


Paradoxical

by ensou



Category: Destiny (Video Games), Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, The Reef
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-30 12:25:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 22,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14496945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ensou/pseuds/ensou
Summary: Wherever she ends up, Taylor Hebert always seems to throw a wrench in things. Why would being resurrected and wielding the Light be any different?Or: in which Taylor ends up becoming the Queen's left hand and the Vanguard has no idea how to handle it.





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Taylor as a Guardian has been done before. But it’s mostly been in the Worm universe, and doesn’t really get to _explore_ the Destiny elements. Over two years ago I posted in an ideas thread for a Destiny/Worm fic, and that’s been percolating in my mind ever since.
> 
> The Taken Queen [[SB](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-taken-queen.536866/)|[FFN](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12534464/1/The-Taken-Queen)] is probably one of the best Destiny fics out there, but it’s extremely niche. You have to know a lot of the background lore and do a lot of Grimoire diving to really grasp just how _deep_ it is.
> 
> I'm big on Destiny lore. On the different factions and species, on the ontological and paracausal powers that exist in it. The Eliksni who chased the thing that gave them success, the Hive who dove into the Deep to save themselves, the Awoken, caught between Light and Dark, unable to exist without both. I love it.
> 
> This (like all of my crossovers) assumes no knowledge of Destiny, but it still helps if you do.

_“I remember everything about the day I was born. I still bear the scars._

_“ **The Awoken** are my family now.”_

* * *

_October, 2631_

If only he’d paid more attention the first time he saw her. Noticed her. But he hadn’t, he’d been too focused on the sudden appearance of the Vandals on either side of the unprotected Awoken woman (their _Queen_ , apparently) armed with spears that crackled with Arc lightning.

It wasn’t until later, in the cockpit of the beaten Arcadia-class jumpship (he _really_ needed to get something better now that he had enough glimmer) that his Ghost turned to him and asked, “Did you notice the woman standing on the side of the room?”

He frowned, glancing at the small, white floating star-shape. “What woman?”

“On the side of the room, when we were meeting the Queen,” the Ghost responded. He —the Ghost had made it _quite_ clear that he was male, with ‘how easy it is to change voices, I mean _really_ ’— turned to look at his Guardian. “I would never have noticed her if I hadn’t decided to go over the memory again for a better look at those Fallen. I think they were once a part of the House of Wolves. That was their colors they were wearing.”

“Play it back for me?”

The Ghost’s optic blinked on, a small blue hologram projecting onto the instrumentation of the jumpship. The view jumped around, largely focused on the Guardian’s own in-video self, but there was a moment where it moved over to the wall of the room and then back, and he thought he saw something on one of the platforms at the edge.

“Did you see it?” the Ghost asked.

“Can you stop it at the right moment?”

“Can I—” his Ghost turned and gave him a flat look, the hologram winking away. “I don’t think I need to dignify that with a response.”

How the little things managed to be so expressive with only the effective equivalent of a single eyebrow he’d never know, but they made it work to scary degrees.

The Ghost turned away, and the blue-tinted hologram reappeared. It went through the same motions as before, except this time it paused on the wall, and now he could see the already-dark figure shrouded in shade.

Long, dark curly hair, and a lightweight armor of muted dark grays and black panels. She stood there uncaring, her back against wall, nothing covering her face other than loose fabric around her neck, but still so shadowed it was impossible to make out distinct features or even her skin color.

He would have sworn she was a Hunter, hand cannon strapped to her thigh and all, if not for the _singular fact_ that _no_ self-respecting Hunter would be caught _dead_ without their cloak, or even just a hood.

The other two things that stood out were the symbols onto her chest and shoulder plates. The Queen’s crown, in grey and darker grey rather than its normal purple and gold, was on the upper left of her chest plate, and a… beetle? of some sort, was on her shoulder.

“Strange. I wonder what she was there for…” the Ghost mused.

Did it matter? It looked like she belonged there, at the least.

Later, he really wished he’d given it more thought, but at the time, his focus was rather absorbed by the fact that he now had to go find a _Gate Lord_. Normal Vex Minotaurs were problems enough on their own, twelve feet of angry metal death-robots and all, but scaled up by three or four times?

He was not looking forward to this mission, even if it _was_ necessary.


	2. Weaver

Zachary glanced over at the woman who walked at his side, still struggling to come to terms it.

_“Mars. Eighty-four North, thirty-two East. Meridian Bay,” Uldren had grit out._

_“Our Weaver shall join you,” the Queen spoke, looking down at him. “To protect our investment.”_

_The tall dark-haired woman at the side of room moved, standing up straight, and then stepped forward into the light, and he barely managed to contain his surprise._

She was human.

Not Awoken. _Human_. In the _Reef_.

No brightly-colored glowing eyes or odd shifting patterns of light or blue-to-purple skin tone.

Human. Caucasian. Dark green eyes and near-black hair. Tall, only an inch shorter than himself and he was fairly tall.

And yet she’d still turned and bowed her head to the white-haired woman standing regally on the raised dais before them, seeming to pass between the two momentarily, between green and pale blue-glowing irides, before it was gone. _“By your leave, my Lady.”_

A human in the Reef who followed the Queen.

He’d never heard of someone like that.

“He’s worried.”

Zachary almost stumbled at her words. He hadn’t expected her to even try to talk. “What?”

The woman looked at him. “The Prince. He is worried what you might mean for the Reef. What antagonizing the Vex might bring. An end to a period of precarious stability and peace.”

The strange Exo’s words came to him. _“A side should always be taken, Little Light. Even if it’s the wrong side.”_

“Why is a human in the Reef?” he found himself asking.

She looked at him, one eyebrow raised, and he couldn’t help but be reminded of the Queen’s own imperious looks only minutes ago.

“Because I never left,” she answered cryptically.

That was _such_ a Warlock answer. Answers that told you everything and nothing all at once.

…He was definitely going to need Rigel’s help decoding that one.

“We’re going into an active war zone,” he noted. _Are you ready for that?_

She just nodded, and then glanced at him as they arrived at the jumpship hangers. “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ve killed many, many Cabal before.”

Oh. Good. At least one of them had, then.

He’d never even been to Mars.

“Don’t worry! We can do this!” a feminine voice stated confidently.

Zachary blinked. _A Ghost_.

A _Ghost_ had suddenly appeared from behind the fabric wrapped around Weaver’s neck, floating out and around her head. And yet she was like no Ghost he’d ever seen, all black metal and sharp shifting edges.

“You’re a Guardian!”

The woman gave him a Look. “Risen,” she corrected.

_What?_

Zachary’s Ghost made a sound like he was clearing his throat (really, why did he do things like that?) and spoke up. “Ah. ‘Risen’ is what Guardians were called before the Vanguard,” he explained helpfully.

The Look turned to the Ghost. “Aaand you’re not part of the Vanguard. …Right.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen another Ghost!” Weaver’s Ghost said, drifting forward and then around Zachary’s. “You’re rather… plain, though,” she noted, looking over the blank white shell.

Zachary’s Ghost drifted back towards him, and he got the distinct impression it would be blushing. “W-well, you know! We’ve been so busy! What with the Fallen. And the Hive. And the Vex. And…” he blinked, turning to Zachary. “You _do_ get into a lot of trouble, Guardian.”

“Kali…” the woman warned, and the black Ghost floated back towards her.

“Sorry, Sorry,” the Ghost apologized.

“…So who’s ready to go fight some Cabal?”


	3. Cabal

The Cabal were _ugly_. Seven feet tall, eight hundred pounds, and without their pressurized helmets they somehow reminded Zachary distinctly of rhinoceroses, despite not having a horn. They simply… did. The way they lumbered, their size and bulk, the tough leathery skin, the way they just _soaked up_ bullets…

Having two people to fight them made things go _much_ easier than his last mission. Fireteams did that. Rigel and Halley-7 would probably chew him out the next time he was in the Tower, but they hadn’t been available for the past week, off doing something in the European Dead Zone.

Their loss.

So far, they’d gotten a link to their sparrows, found another Cabal base, killed a commander (and a few other squads), taken his terminal access key, and Zachary’s Ghost was now diving into the Cabal systems to try and find out more about the giant Vex gate that was the way into the Black Garden.

“I doubt they know what it is, even if they’ve managed to get inside the Vex networks,” Weaver said, standing off to the side where she and Kali watched his Ghost work.

He looked over at her in curiosity. “Why?”

“Because they only care about things that let them expand quickly. The Cabal aren’t very patient or invested in research. They’re a heavily industrialized warring species,” she said. “Blow up planets for getting in their way, remember?”

“How do you know so much about them?”

She turned away and looked out at the giant ring Gate and the red, rocky expanse before them. “This was where Kali found me.”

_…Oh._

“I spent weeks fighting them while trying to find a workable ship to get away,” she said, looking back at him.

“Well, you’re right about them getting into the Vex networks,” Zachary’s Ghost said. “And that they have no idea what the Gate really is. But I did find out a way to wake that Gate Lord’s eye again. All we need to do is charge it with a Vex spire connected to the Gate. Luckily, there’s one pretty close by. Unfortunately, it’s in the middle of a Cabal warbase.”

Of _course_ it was.

* * *

Zachary watched as Weaver reloaded her pulse rifle and chambered it, standing over the corpse of Primus Sha’aul, staring at it for a moment. And then she just turned and started walking towards him, clicking the safety on before putting the rifle over her shoulder onto her back. He could have sworn he’d seen it somewhere before, but couldn’t think of where…

It had been a major trek through the Cabal defensive lines to the warbase, even if they made good time. They’d only just gotten to the spire when the Primus of the area showed up, apparently unwilling to let any more of his troops be killed.

A few fifty-caliber rounds to the head, some light suppressing fire from Weaver, and a single trusty RPG ended that fairly quickly.

“And it looks like we have a working eye!” Kali said, floating around at where the spherical object was embedded in the short Vex column, glowing red once more. “Oh, this is so exciting!”

“Speak for yourself,” Zachary’s own Ghost retorted. “I swear it’s just one thing after another with you, Guardian,” he said, looking at Zachary.

“Sorry,” he returned, unrepentant. Not _his_ fault the Vanguard kept making him follow up on the things he found. First the Fallen when he was resurrected to get that ship, then the Hive after that Wizard in the Cosmodrome, then the Vex when they followed that Exo’s coordinates, and then the Cabal to be able to deal with the Vex following the Exo’s information…

Dominoes. So many dominoes, lined up to fall.

Now, though, at least, they had a chance to breathe. Everything had been prepared, eye charged and ready, and they weren’t on any _immediate_ time constraint, though the sooner the better, likely. Still, he was a bit tired from today. Not physically, thanks to the Light, but the amount of mental focus and awareness required from fighting was exhausting in its own way.

Better to face the Garden well-rested and prepared. And maybe wait until Rigel and Halley could join them. He had a feeling that a larger fireteam would be very useful for this sort of thing if they could.

“We should rest,” Zachary suggested. “Prepare. So that we can be ready for anything.”

Weaver nodded agreeably.

He still wasn’t sure if she was a Hunter or a Warlock. She moved like the former, but used abilities like the latter. He’d seen her Drain a Cabal and shock a whole squad into static with chain-lightning, but also dissolve into smoke as she dodged.

And her Light…

He’d used a set of Fist of Havoc against a small platoon, pulses of Arc energy left behind that she’d eyed curiously, drawing in the sparks of Light that were all that remained of the Cabal afterwards, and then only minutes later displayed her own trump card.

It was Solar, he knew that much. But it wasn’t a form of Radiance (that he could tell) or the Hunters’ Golden Guns. A veritable swarm of small embers had surrounded her, wrapping her like a blanket before flying off and attaching themselves to numerous Cabal, detonating moments later and rendering them all into nothing more than ash.

He’d almost laughed when he realized what they reminded him of.

Fireflies, like the ones that appeared at the Tower.

_Fire. Flies._

One on its own might be only an inconvenience, but he wasn’t afraid to admit that the number she’d called and used was… intimidating.

Still, he had other things to worry about now than how she used her Light.

“I’ll be heading back to the City…”

“I’m to stay with you until the Heart is destroyed,” she said bluntly. “I can’t do that half-way across the solar system.”

Fair enough.

“Alright…” he allowed. “Ghost?”

“Already on the way,” the automaton told him, and sure enough Zachary could see his jumpship breaking through the cloud cover. “Let’s go home.”

* * *

The first warning that something was wrong was when the moment they dropped out of slipspace just outside of Earth’s gravity well and he was immediately hailed over the comms.

“Guardian! Guardian!?”

“Kali?” his Ghost returned. “What’s wrong?”

“I-I don’t know!” the other Ghost responded, her voice taut, frayed. “It’s Weaver! She was fine and then she just… just stopped! I can’t get any response out of her! She’s not moving or anything!”

This… could be bad.

“The City. It’s the closest place we can get the help,” Zachary said, thinking aloud.

“O-okay. Okay,” she agreed.

“Follow our trajectory,” Zachary’s Ghost said.

“Tower, this is Guardian Zeta-Four-Nine-Alpha requesting immediate emergency medical attention for escorted Reef ship,” Zachary called.

“Roger that. EMS notified and standing by,” returned Amanda Holliday. “It’s nice to hear your voice again. And did you say _Reef_?”

“Affirmative,” the Guardian’s Ghost answered for him.

“Well I’ll be darned. Anyways, we’re ready for you when you get here,” she responded.

“Thirty seconds out.”

“Copy that.”

It was one of the longer thirty seconds he’d ever experienced, mostly because there was nothing he could do but _sit_ there, the ship’s autopilot handling the approach and landing for him. And he was quite sure the Queen wouldn’t be happy if “her” Weaver somehow (truly) died when she was with him.

He did not want to accidentally start any wars. There was more than enough fighting already.

They came in hot, skipping the standard holding/landing pattern to buzz the Tower hangar and just materialize, Weaver appearing less than a second after on the stretcher manned by a pair of medical Warlocks only a meter away. They wasted no time in whisking her towards the medical facilities, and Zachary followed behind, feeling at least somewhat responsible.

She was pale, unmoving and absolutely still, and he could only barely see her breathing. Her eyes stared at the ceiling, open and glazed over. Looking at her for more than a few seconds felt unnatural, like seeing something that was just _wrong_.

…What had happened to her?

And what could have possibly caused it?


	4. Passenger

She remembered.

The golden man.

_“I know you want to help, but it’s too dangerous. You’re too strong, and this situation is fragile. It’ll do more harm than good.”_

The reason.

_“We all have our parts to play.”_

_“Parts.”_

_“Yes. Like actors taking a role in a play. We wear our human faces and harbor our dramas and fantasies, but it’s the same individuals playing the parts, as the play starts anew on a different stage, with different faces and forms. If it all goes well, a figure from the crowd joins the stage for the plays that follow, and the roles are refined.”_

She remembered things she couldn’t possibly know.

_The fragments radiate outwards, shedding and dropping their protective shells as they sail into the black, empty void._

_They are children. Offspring. They travel the void, hoping to encounter another habitable world._

_This is the beginning._

Things lost.

_I saw faces in the crowd. Young women riding a monster, blocking my path. More than any of the others, they were strangers in the manner I’d identified the rest of the crowd before. People I had some connection to, all the more strange because of the lack of recognition._

_People kept getting in my_ fucking _way._

Things gained; a duality through sacrifice.

‘A force of nature. Impossible to control or prevent.’ _The words crossed my mind, and they were my words, but they weren’t my thoughts._

‘Reminding me of the bad old days, Passenger?’ _I thought to myself. My bugs continued to gather around me. A familiar and comfortable presence, considering everything that was happening._

‘I’m not giving up!’ _My voice, sounding so far away, even in my own head, so young._

‘Damn straight.’

The blurring.

_“I don’t-” I started. What had I been saying?_

_Not me. The passenger. I had to relax. Allow myself to speak._

Death.

_So many stars. The universe so vast._

‘We’re s- so very small, in the end.’

Aching loss and emptiness on one side. _‘Why did she have to go? Why did Mom have to die!?’_

A pervasive sense of incompleteness on the other.

Surprise, excitement, now. _‘Come on Ems! We gotta go find more!’_

She remembered now.

_Hello, Passenger._

* * *

It was odd, remembering how… hobbled she’d been, there at the end. It was rather embarrassing, actually. Where before control of her body had felt fragmented, now it was just… detached.

She could already feel that _need_. There was none of the fuzziness that it had caused before, but she still knew that she’d do better with conflict, with _direction_.

Somehow, her body —her self— wasn’t as affected by the brain surgery that Panacea had done. Was it because she was made of Light, now? Kali said it was so far beyond physics that it didn’t even obey cause and effect, that it was what allowed Risen to react faster than thought, to not just bend but outright _break_ reality.

She felt her other-half following down that line, remembering the things she’d learned about Light, about Kali and what she was now. Her second death, at the hands of a Cabal Centurion, and how she’d outright _rejected_ it, bringing herself back into being through sheer force of will, blazing like the sun. The Cabal ship. The Broken Legion. The Reef. The Queen. The Awoken.

She felt interest, insatiable curiosity drawn from memories of when she was younger.

_‘Alright, alright. But we need to fix me first.’_

It was her body. Her Light. The connection to her Passenger was regulated through that lobe in her brain. So she just needed to figure how to change that.

There was no way she was getting her bugs back. Not without Panacea, who was likely _long_ dead.

And wasn’t _that_ a can of worms she didn’t really want to open right now. _Six hundred years_.

Back on track. Pollentia. Out of control.

The thought of being Khepri again gave her chills/apprehension. …Even her passenger knew it wasn’t a good idea. Not in this time, this _solar system_ that held creatures like the Hive and the Vex, the Jovians and the Harbingers, monsters like Crota who feasted on reality itself like it was the finest flesh. Unlike what she knew, the rules now were variable, liable to change at the will of the one you opposed.

The best thing she could think of to help her was the Techeun’s augments. From what she understood about them their powers were largely mental and brain-based as well. Still, that didn’t tell her how to go about limiting herself _now_.

…This was going to require _so_ much meditation, wasn’t it?

* * *

Five hours after she arrived, Weaver’s eyes fluttered.

Zachary’s Ghost bumped him, quickly bringing him to awareness even as Kali rushed over to her Risen’s prone form, the shifting jagged edges that made up her shell fluctuating faster than ever before.

“Weaver?”

The woman groaned, raising her right hand and massaging her forehead with the heel of her palm. “You really don’t appreciate having two limbs until you’ve dealt with not having one.”

“What?” Kali asked, and then shook herself. “No, wait, that’s not important. What happened, Weaver? Are you okay?”

“Taylor.”

“What?” Kali repeated.

“My name. It was— _is_ , Taylor. Weaver was just a codename,” the dark-haired woman answered, slowly lifting herself up.

“You… you remember your past? Your first life? How?”

“I guess you could say I had a backup? Kinda? Um.” She struggled for a moment. “Do you know what that one Kell called the Queen? ’An empty thing with—”

“‘two dead souls’, yes, I remember,” Kali said. “It was meant as an insult.”

“I… I guess you could say I found my second soul again.” She laughed, the sound carrying a dark edge. “A dead thing with two empty souls.”

Her Ghost shrunk. “Y-you don’t really believe that, do you?” she asked, sounding hurt, and Weaver — _Taylor_ —, blinked, her eyes widening as she looked at Kali.

“Oh God, Kali. No. _No_.” Taylor reached out and grabbed the black Ghost, hugging it to herself, and Zachary started to feel that he was intruding on something deeply personal.

He also wondered how the heck Taylor was managing to avoid stabbing herself, but that was another issue.

“I didn’t mean it like— Ugh. You’re my _Ghost_. My… my—” And Taylor uttered something guttural that rolled out of the back of her throat.

“That was Eliksni,” Zachary’s Ghost whispered to him. “It’s complex, but roughly translates to something like a platonic soulmate, a ‘life-sharer’, literally ‘one who will always come first that I am stronger with and weaker without’.”

“So, you’re okay now?” Zachary asked, drawing her attention to him.

Taylor grimaced. “ _Kind_ of. Um. I’ve regained this background ability that’s pretty scary that I don’t have a lot of control over right now. I…” She sighed. “If someone gets within sixteen feet of me, their body becomes… mine. A puppet. And I can’t stop it. It looks like it doesn’t work on Risen, because of the Light, so until I have control of it, I’m going to have to stay away from normal people and immediately push them back out of my range.”

That was… mildly terrifying, if he was being honest.

Still… “It’s a good thing you’re in the Tower, then, with all the Guardians,” he noted, and she nodded.

“Yeah, this is probably the best place for me, right now,” she said, shifting her legs off of the hospital bed and sitting up straight, Kali nestled in the wrap around her neck. “So what sort of stuff do you do around here for fun?”

He shrugged. He’d not actually spent a lot of time in the Tower itself, the past few weeks had been split between almost non-stop missions and resting at his apartment. “There’s people you can talk to, like the gunsmith.” She perked up at that. “…There’s the Vanguard leaders,” he said, thinking. “Oh! And there’s Shaxx and the Crucible!” Taylor tilted her head in curiosity. “It’s this live-fire arena where you fight against other Guardians. It’s like a way to practice.”

“That sounds interesting,” Taylor admitted.

He nodded. “I… think the Warlocks have an archive-library? But I’ve never been there. There’s restaurants, too.”

At that very moment, Taylor’s stomach gurgled, and she flushed. “Food sounds… good.”

Zachary grinned. “Food it is, then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> O hai ther QA.


	5. Sister

To my Queen, Mara Sov,

You will never read this, I know. But perhaps it may give me some form of insight into your decision.

I cannot ask anything but: Why?

I don’t understand. What does this girl have that makes her so special as to receive your personal consideration? What makes her so deserving as to be offered (and accept!) a position in your Guard?

She is _human_! Not Awoken. Not even _Earthborn_. How can we know that she is telling the truth? How can we know that she will not run back to her masters in their pathetic Tower as soon her purpose is served?

The Fallen I understand. They are beaten, leashed by their own sensibilities. Strength is everything and you crushed them; they could do nothing but bow to their new Kell.

But _this_? My lady, she is Risen! They serve none but themselves, and yet rather than aid a swift departure, you offer her home? (Or perhaps you did, and she chose to stay? If so, perhaps I can begin to understand, but the question of why she would do so when given the alternative still remains.)

I have only heard stories, and even then the details become whispers. Of _Cabal_ , attacking this place, our _home_ , yet being defeated before the alarm was even sounded. The whispers, saying she came with them, and had some hand in it. But what could be so notable as to draw your attention?

My Queen, I wish to understand. She is to become my sister-in-arms, but I am no closer to understanding than before. Tomorrow training starts but how am I to work with her _truly_ if I do not?

Still, I shall trust your judgment, even if you

_[Letter ends abruptly, paper wrinkled as though crumpled harshly]_


	6. Egress

Red dust blew in her face, and she was more grateful than ever for the tattered fabric she was using as a mask to breathe and goggles she’d found inside one of the abandoned buildings.

She was glad that she didn’t need to eat or drink any more, even if it wasn’t particularly comfortable and pleasant, because otherwise she would have died pretty early on.

According to Kali (her ‘Ghost’), this was because the Risen were constructs of this ‘Light’ energy stuff and so she didn’t need the fuel.

She was tired of the red. She just wanted off this stupid barren rock of a planet. Anything would be better than here.

“How much further?”

“A little over ten miles,” her Ghost’s voice echoed in her head.

She sighed and kept moving. They’d already traveled hundreds of miles, all to get to a command base. There’d been outposts, and she’d probably killed over a hundred ‘Cabal’ by now, but none of them had the level of data access Kali said she needed to search for a ship.

So command base it was.

It didn’t matter how many Cabal were there guarding it, she’d go through them all if it meant getting off this rock.

After all, it wasn’t like they could kill her.

* * *

She sat for a moment, enjoying the chance to rest, her back against the wall of the room they were in as Kali did some thing with her optic and beams of light that somehow meant she was hacking it. The Cabal access code they’d found on one of the corpses probably helped too.

She’d likely more than tripled her kill count by now. Between the Cabal and those weird robots Kali called ‘the Vex’ (but mostly the Cabal), she was getting quite a lot of practice at this whole “kill them before they kill you” thing.

…Though those stupid sniper Vex still kept getting her.

“Alright, I’ve got good news and bad news!” Kali said, turning to look at her. “What do you want first?”

“Bad news,” she responded.

“There’s no abandoned ships that are undamaged enough we could fly, much less jump planets. At least not that the Cabal have found. And they’ve done a _lot_ of surveying so as much as I hate to admit it they’re _probably_ right.”

Well, shit.

Ugh. She massaged the bridge of her nose, trying to ease the headache she was starting to feel. “And the good news?”

The Ghost wavered, floating back and forth as though prevaricating. “A Cabal Centurion, a… Valus Trau’ug recently requested to launch an attack on the Reef, and was turned down. The encrypted messages continued after that within his detachment, arguing for it and getting more heated. It… sounds like he plans to mutiny and go there anyways.”

“So…?”

“Soooo, how do you feel about hitching a ride on a Cabal warship?”

* * *

It was decidedly not comfortable. Infiltrating the ship had been a serious undertaking, and there were so many Cabal that she wasn’t even sure she could realistically take them all on herself before they overwhelmed her and destroyed Kali.

She was currently hiding in a nook on one of the engineering decks, protected from view by a number of small objects and pipework.

“So what exactly is the Reef?” she whispered, her voice drowned out by the humming of machinery.

She probably should have asked this before they were _on the ship going there_ , but getting off Mars was seriously all she really cared about.

‘It’s the home of the Awoken, 4-Vesta and the surrounding asteroid field,’ Kali answered her directly, dematerialized as she was.

“The Awoken?”

‘A race of people that were caught between the Dark and the Light during the Collapse. The first ones used to be human, but nowadays… not so much. They look human, just… with blueish skin. And glowing eyes. And facial marks. And patterns of light under their skin.’

Well. Okay then.

“But they are… people? Not aliens?”

‘Yes? Why?’

She sucked in a sharp breath. “We can’t let this attack happen.”

Flashes of vague memories. Of death and destruction on a horrendous scale, of pain and—

It was gone. Still, it was enough for her to know that she _couldn’t_ let this happen, not if she could do something about it.

‘Okay, but how? There’s too many Cabal, even for _you_.’

She frowned, thinking. The humming of the room pervaded her thou— Oh. _There_ was an idea.

“Crash.”

‘What?’

“The ship. We crash it. You can revive me, right? But the Cabal can’t.”

‘…I like this idea.’

She almost laughed. “I thought you would.”

‘How should we do it, though?’

“A ship this big has to have reverse thrusters, right? And some kind of steering. We could disable those.”

’Ah… You do realize that a ship this large impacting an asteroid at the speed it travels through space could still do a lot of damage, right?"

Hrm. “Then we just have to make sure it doesn’t hit anything important, don’t we?”

Kali laughed. ‘I suppose so, Weaver.’

 _Weaver._ The one strong connection she had to her first life, between the sense of endless fighting and conflict. She could almost hear the name spoken in her fuzzy, lost and fragmented memories, over and over by others, some of the clearest memories she had (as clear as they could get, at least).

There was another name, one that she could almost feel right on the tip of her tongue but couldn’t say. A sibilant, jagged word that she sometimes heard in dreams but could never hold onto.

‘Let’s go try to find a free access terminal so we can see where we are,’ Kali suggested, drawing her out of her thoughts. ‘And avoid raising the alarms while we’re at it.’

Oh _great_. More sneaking.

* * *

Thankfully it seemed the crew was bare-bones (which kind of made sense, being a mutiny and all) and she’d only run into a few Cabal, and easily able to find places to hide before they saw her.

They were finally able to find a terminal without any Cabal around it, and Kali got to work immediately, doing her beam-hacking thing again.

“Okay, we’re still in hyperspace. We’ll be dropping out in a little over twenty minutes,” the Ghost said softly. “It looks like the best place for messing with the controls is engineering, since the bridge is probably swarming with Cabal. I’ve got a map, so let’s go!”

Kali dematerialized. ‘We need to go right. I’ll guide you.’

It almost felt too quiet —only punctuated by the Cabal that had crossed her path— the way she kept to shadows and hid to prevent detection.

‘Okay, we’re almost there. And… there’s probably going to be Cabal in there. Hit them fast, get me to the console, and I’ll try to stop any alarms and lock the doors.’

She nodded. “Gun.”

The weapon that materialized in her right hand was rather similar to the Cabal’s own slug rifles. Which made sense, considering it pretty much _was_ a Cabal slug rifle that she’d scavenged and modified early on.

All three of the weapons she had were like that. Scavenged. Modified. Adapted.

They suited her poorly, but it was the best she could do right now, and finding ammunition for them (well, the slug rifle, at least) was easy.

‘And three… two… one.’

She rushed towards the door that Kali pointed out, finding a large room filled with machinery and four Cabal inside.

Before they could even notice her, she’d raised the rifle to her shoulder and fired twice at the closest’s head, the helmet exploding at the sudden decompression and the Cabal soldier collapsing.

Tuck. Roll. Cover. Peek. Shoot.

Two down.

Run. Jump, shoot, stab, roll.

Three.

The last bellowed at her as she stood in front of it, unafraid. It barely had a chance to raise its gun before there were two microjets destroying its helmet, a third making sure it was dead before it hit the ground.

“Kali, go,” she said, the Ghost materializing instantly and rushing over to the console, beginning her work.

“Already going.” The doors shut only seconds later, the large circular lock turning in place.

She took the moment to start collecting ammunition from the aliens’ corpses, tucking a set of loaded magazines away and putting the next by Kali so she could dematerialize it when she got a chance.

“Okay. Okay. Um. Controls. Controls. Controls…” the Ghost said to herself.

There was a pounding on the door.

“Kali!”

“It’s locked but… oh. They’re overriding it. Captain’s codes. Weaver, you’re going to have to hold them off before they shut me out completely.”

She sighed and crouched down behind a short barrier that bordered the elevate control area they were on.

“Rifle.”

A weight settled on her back and she pulled it over while storing the modified Cabal weapon.

She both loved and hated this rifle so much.

It was enjoyable. Better than the Cabal gun. It was just too long-range and slow for most purposes. And she only disliked it because of how many times she’d died to it. Stupid Vex.

There was a sort of vindictive pleasure in turning your enemies’ weapons on them and then _using them better_.

The lock on the door spun, and she leaned over the barrier, looking down the sights at where she expected them to come in.

The door opened, and right at the front in the center was a Legionary who twisted his head, looking over the room.

Unfortunately, by the time he saw her she’d charged and fired, the upper body vaporized and drifting away into ash.

She didn’t pause, immediately starting the next charge and turning to the next visible target, the gun firing after a moment of lining it up.

The door was fully open, and the Cabal took full advantage of the space to rush in faster than she could pick them off, though she still kept charging and firing until they’d gotten half-way across the room, at which point she threw the laser rifle over her shoulder and picked up the Cabal gun.

One. Two. Burst. One. Two. Burst. One. Two—Woops, missed the helmet. Three. Burst.

She rolled, shifting to the other side of the command level and starting to pick the ones who’d started to come up the left ramp off.

Four more Cabal later and it seemed she’d— Oh wait, no, there was more coming in now. And two of them have those annoying shields.

One. Two. Burst. One. Two. Burst. …And now she’s getting hit. Time to move.

She shifted locations again, throwing out a compressed ball of the empty energy that Kali said was “Void” right into the middle of the group, the ball expanding into a three-dimensional gravity well that drew the aliens in, tearing them apart and _erasing_ them until it dissipated a few seconds later.

_Alright what’s next?_

“Kali?”

The Ghost didn’t look towards her, just continuing her work. “Yeah, I’m almost done. Just a _little_ bit more. We’ve gotta— AHA! Thought you could take that away from me, well, look who’s laughing _now_?”

The doors started closing, drawing her attention, and she saw another wave of Cabal rushing towards the engineering room, a Centurion at the front. When he saw the doors closing, he tromped towards her faster as her view of him narrowed. The last thing she saw was him sticking his hand in the gap as if to pull the doors open himself, and then the sharp _crunch_ of endoskeleton being crushed, his now-detached fingers falling to the floor.

The lock on the door spun closed.

“ _Whew_. Almost didn’t expect that to work.” She turned to Kali, the white-shelled Ghost looking back at her. “Managed to isolate the subsystems for this door, manipulate it, and then lock it all away behind encryption that would take a few decades to crack at _least_. I am _good_.”

“So… we’re locked in a giant spaceship that we’re _trying_ to crash with an angry army outside the doors?” Weaver summarized.

“Well, of _course_ it doesn’t sound all that great when you put it like _that_ ,” Kali replied petulantly. “Anyways, it looks like the ship’s going to be dropping out almost _dangerously_ close to 4 Vesta, probably to try and surprise the Awoken. I disabled the primary reverse thrusters and large-scale direction control. So the Cabal are probably going to fire the secondary thrusters even if it won’t do all that much when they see we’re going to crash, and _we_ can use the fine controls that I also grabbed access to and direct it somewhere it won’t hit anything.”

Weaver nodded, replacing the magazine from the Cabal slug rifle (seriously why was it called that? It wasn’t a rifle and didn’t shoot slugs) and tossing the empty and single half-used ones to Kali, who dematerialized them and would handle automatically refilling them when they were rematerialized.

A pounding on the door had her jumping to attention immediately, weapon aimed at the doorway.

“Don’t worry. Just that Centurion’s missiles. Nothing short of a tank round’s going to get through there,” Kali said, sounding pleased with herself. “And they can’t get a tank up here. …I checked.”

She forced herself to relax, and let Kali dematerialize the weapons as well.

“Exiting hyperspace in three, two, one—” There was a bone-shaking _shudder_ as the ship dropped back into realspace. A moment later there were a series of more shudders, but they felt less _real_ somehow. “Space debris. There’s hundreds of wrecked ships out here. That’s why it’s called the Reef. Not that anything like that could ever stop a Cabal ship. Over-engineering is practically their middle name, and they consider ramming to be a perfectly reasonable tactic. If there’s one thing the Cabal do well, it’s brute force.”

She hummed thoughtfully.

“Alright, impact in less than a minute. Analyzing visual data… Ooooh. There’s a nice spot. Nothing around for over twenty miles. Looks like some sort of reserved area that’s yet to be developed? Well, too bad. _We’ve_ got a ship to crash. Adjusting… _That’s_ going to be close.”

Weaver sat down against the floor and the console, drawing her legs up, her eyes on Kali as the Ghost worked. “Come on, come _on_. …There! Wooo! One Cabal Warship on a perfect impact vector in thirty seconds.”

Kali stopped her work, floating over to the seated young woman as the ship began shaking around them. “Kali, if we don’t—” she cut herself off, shaking her head. “Thank you. Thank you for giving me a second chance. Thank you for being my Ghost.”

The Ghost nudged her cheek before settling into the space between her legs and torso so that Weaver was almost curled around the other. “And thank you for being my Risen,” Kali returned, uncharacteristically solemn.

She swallowed and nodded, wrapping herself around the Ghost as the shaking around them worsened, became harsher and suddenly much stronger.

And then there was nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comment, critique, all that. This is extremely rough for me, but then again this entire story is pretty rough for me so maybe that’s just par for the course.


	7. Consolation

She sat still on the bed she’d been placed on, sitting up straight with her legs crossed and breathing evenly. The Guardian she was to watch — _Zachary_ , apparently— had gone to get food for them after they realized there was no way she could go out into the Tower right now with all the civilians around. Not until she had at least _some_ measure of control over her power or arrangements could be made.

Maybe she could do something like retract the range so that it only included her? Like a reverse of how it had seemed to expand with conflict. But Lisa had said that the range for _this_ power was fixed, so maybe that wasn’t possible?

“Weav— Taylor?”

She opened her eyes to look at her Ghost. “You can still call me Weaver, Kali. It was practically my name in the last years of my first life, and it’s what I’ve had for all of this one.”

“What… what are you trying to do? I mean you’re meditating…” The Ghost sounded oddly off-balance, like she was lost and didn’t know what to do.

“So that growth in my brain that those medics asked about?” she began.

Kali cut her off. “You told them it was ‘supposed’ to look like that… like a lightning storm of activity. But it’s _never_ been active like this before. _I would know!_ ”

“Kali…”

“Everything’s changing and I don’t understand and I-I’m— Weaver, I’m _scared_.” Taylor swallowed, her throat thick. “What am I supposed to be _doing_?” the Ghost asked, her voice high and panicked. “I don’t even have an idea what you’re thinking anymore!”

Taylor held out her hand. “Kali, come here,” she said softly, motioning to come towards her.

The Ghost approached slowly, watching Taylor’s face, and she felt her heart crack at the thought that Kali was so wary of her now. She’d already screwed up once today, practically declaring that nothing they had done, none of their memories and time together had meant anything to her. That Kali wasn’t important to her.

Which was _not_ true. At all. As she rather strongly stated as soon as she realized her mistake.

She drew the Ghost closer to her, holding her gently. “I’m sorry. I can tell you the basics right now, but I don’t think I have anywhere near enough time to tell you everything before Zachary gets back.”

She took a breath, thoughts organizing themselves. It was strange that she almost couldn’t tell whether it was her or her passenger, but at this point she was resigned to the bleed-through.

It was almost ridiculous, really, how she’d been so worried about whether she was being influenced by her passenger when she’d been a Ward, and then willingly having Panacea tear down the walls and strengthen the connection to the point it was now.

“My name was Taylor Hebert. I was born in 1996—”

Kali’s shell spread slightly in surprise. “That was before the Golden Age! I-I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a Risen from before the Golden Age! Then again… they don’t really remember much,” the Ghost said, before her optic snapped to Taylor’s face. “But… how were you on Mars, then? There wasn’t commercial spaceflight that early, right?”

Taylor shook her head. “I don’t know. I really, _really_ don’t know. There’s only a few people I know who could have gotten me there, _maybe_.”

Contessa. Glaistig Uaine. Dragon and Defiant. And she wasn’t even sure if this was Earth-Bet’s dimension or not. She had a feeling it wasn’t, considering the lack of mentions about odd powers before the Great Machine arrived.

“Anyways. I grew up with my mom and dad. My mom died when I was thirteen, and my dad and I didn’t cope very well. I was bullied badly in high school, and it got to the point where I triggered.”

“Triggered?” Kali asked curiously.

“My world had… people who exhibited inexplicable abilities. We called them ‘parahumans’. And these abilities were generally gained at a moment of extreme emotional stress.”

“But… how? Your genetic code doesn’t have any abnormal deviations—”

“The Pollentia,” Taylor answered.

“What?”

“Potential parahumans were discovered to have an extra region of dense neural connections in their brain—the Corona Pollentia. Where it was located _exactly_ changed from person to person. When someone triggered, a section of it became more active, like… another motor area. That was what let people use their abilities, like they were a new set of muscles and senses. The Gemma.”

“And you…”

“I’m… a bit of a special case,” Taylor admitted awkwardly. “Eventually we found out that the abilities weren’t ‘ours’. Humanity’s. They were actually fragments of these two creatures from space, all sitting on other Earths. We were just directing them. The Pollentia was like a cable box, the Gemma was the buttons and display on the front, the fragment on the other end was your provider, and you only got so many channels as part of your cable package from your box.

“Except sometimes, if something bad enough happened, you’d trigger again, and your provider would let the box be able to decode _more_ channels. …I had someone hack mine and give me _all_ the channels, but it wasn’t HD any more.”

Kali stared at her. “…What’s a cable box?”

She couldn’t help it. She started laughing.

The Ghost floated up as Taylor tried to stop. “No, seriously. What’s a cable box?”

She didn’t know why it was so funny, but with everything else that had happened that day it just _was_.

It took her a good minute to get a hold of herself and be able to breathe normally again.

“It’s like the radio in our Seeker I had to replace last month. A digital signal decoder and decrypter that’s used to access a number of different channels, with different channels needing different keys.”

“Ohhhhh. …Why didn’t you just say that the first time?”

Weaver shrugged. “I’m still… adjusting to all of this. Everything coming back together.” She took a breath. “Anyways. The fragments influenced their receivers towards what they wanted —conflict, to learn from how we used the abilities and make them better— but it happened the other way too. We influenced them. The ones of us who had the strongest connections to our passengers could almost feel them, and the influence was stronger. Both ways. And they had to be keeping backups of… us, really, with the Butcher and Glaistig Uaine.

“So when I had my Pollentia altered to give me _more_ , expand my connection even more, well, those limiters were there for our own safety. I became a _monster_ , Kali.” Her voice cracked. “I-I thought I was doing the right thing, but I became this… _machine_ that only cared about the next objective, the next fight. I could _feel_ my thoughts slowing down without that drive, that conflict. It’s only because of the Light that I’m not like that now.”

A memory rose, unbidden. A six year-old Taylor, looking up her Mom, the remnants of broken dinner plates around her. _‘I-I’m sorry!’_ she blubbered, before her mother drew her into a hug and told her everything was alright.

An apology and sympathetic comfort all in one.

_‘…Thanks, Passenger.’_

A vague sense of satisfaction, drawn from a perfect grade she’d gotten in middle school.

“Weaver, I…” the Ghost in her hands floated up so she was eye-level, and then stilled, optic flickering between her eyes. “You would _not_ be my Risen if you weren’t worthy of it. That’s how it works.”

She nodded, a tenuous smile on her face.

“So you’re… reconnected to this ‘passenger’ now? And you got all your memories back through that,” Kali summarized.

“Yeah. It’s… weird. I’ve been Weaver longer than I was Taylor. I’m trying to make everything fit but it’s like we’re two different people, but not? She was so _naïve_ , Kali. Naïve and hypocritical and _selfish_. In the end it always came down to getting her way. But it also explains so much.”

“I thin—” the Ghost was cut off as the door to the medical room opened, a still-armored Zachary entering with two different containers of food in his hands.

“Wasn’t sure what you wanted, so I got roast beef, beans, and mashed potatoes, and a chicken, vegetable, and rice stir fry. Which one?”

Weaver mentally shifted gears, focusing on the change in topic and resolving to continue the conversation with Kali later.

“The roast beef, please,” she said, Zachary handing her the requested container. “Thanks.” She opened it eagerly, Kali materializing a set of utensils for her.

Meat in the Reef was… weird. Grown in vats.

Now that she thought about it, she’d never _actually_ had real meat in her entire second life. But she could still remember it as Taylor. This was going to really be messing with her head for a while, wasn’t it?

She pushed aside the complicated thoughts and focused on enjoying her dinner.

It made her feel nostalgia in the weirdest ways.

After a minute, she looked up at the heavily-armored man in the chair at the side of the room, eating his own food—though he was doing it with chopsticks.

“Tell me about yourself. Where are you from?”

He looked up at her, seeming surprised. “There’s a wall along the southern border of Old Russia. Ghost found me right outside of it. I don’t know where I was from originally.”

Weaver nodded. “How long’ve you been around?”

Zachary shrugged. “Three weeks?”

Taylor almost choked, and had to pound on her chest to dislodge something stuck in her esophagus. “ _Three weeks_?”

“Yes?” he responded as though not seeing _anything_ wrong with that.

_My Queen, save me from ignorant fools._

“You’re going after the literal _manifestation of darkness in the solar system_ , with only three weeks of experience?”

“Hey, we’ve done pretty well so far,” his Ghost cut in. “We brought you that Gate Lord’s head, didn’t we?”

Weaver swallowed the words that threatened to emerge, grudgingly admitting that _yes_ , if he could handle a Gate Lord on his own, both of them and two others would likely enough.

And yes, okay, the image of him dropping that head at her Queen’s feet was mildly more impressive, now.

Could she have killed a Gate Lord at three weeks? She’d like to think so, at least. And crashing a whole Cabal warship into a major asteroid had its own sort of impact.

…Pun not intended.

“And… you?” he asked warily, as if expecting her to do something for asking her a question. “Mars?”

She nodded. “Yes. That’s where Kali found me. The City of Ivraitin, Oxia Palus. Not that it’s very different from the _rest_ of Mars. But I’m originally from the East coast of North America.”

“I can’t imagine what it’s like, remembering your first life…”

“Shocking,” she told him sharply. “I now have the memories of a girl from six hundred years ago. Or… I remember being her. Or I _was_ her. And _I’m_ six hundred years in the future. It’s the worst of culture-shock, in both directions.”

He grimaced sympathetically.

_…Wait, why am I even telling him this?_

…

 _Shit._ She was more off-balance than she thought. Getting all those memories back was affecting her more than she expected.

That was _dangerous_.

It would have been easier if the memories of being Taylor were dulled and faded, buried under the years of Weaver, the Queen’s Blade.

Instead everything was fresh, like it had just happened yesterday.

Thanks, Passenger.

She could just see Tattletale and Bitch’s faces as they realized she was truly lost cause from their place on Rachel’s dogs. Imp’s reaction as she’d lashed out, cutting at her hands.

No. Not the time to do this. Not here. Not now. Not in front of this Guardian.

She took a breath. Pushed all the emotions aside into the vague swarm of things in her radius. She was sorely feeling the loss of her wide-range precision control over her creatures right now. This… limited direction that she could give them was so much less useful at the moment.

Still, she’d adapted before, and she’d do it again. She’d achieved more with less.

And besides, she had help now.

_‘Don’t I, Passenger?’_

A feeling of warm agreement that she felt but didn’t come from her.

She’d get through this.

She always did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so. Question. What do you guys think of the shorter chapters? Do you like them? Hate them? Would you rather they were longer?
> 
> I’ve been told pacing feels _fast_ for this story, and in part that’s _because_ the chapters are so short: it feels like what divides the story into important chunks snap by _so quick_. You reach the end and it’s _next next next_.
> 
> There _are_ going to be some shorter chapters no matter what. I’m going to be including both outside perspectives and Grimoire-style segments which will _naturally_ be shorter. But for Taylor and Zachary’s narrative, what are your thoughts and feelings?
> 
> Does the faster update interval affect your opinion?
> 
> Tell me! (Please?)


	8. Council

Three leaders stood at their long table, the large room around them empty as dusk fell outside the large windows at the end of the room. At the end of the table, a tall blue-skinned man armored in full cut an imposing figure that sharply contrasted both the shorter dark-skinned woman dressed in clothes akin to robes and the bright blue android in light leather-like armor accented by a long cape.

“So. Onto the final topic today before we conclude today’s meeting. I have heard we have a… visitor,” Zavala said, looking between his counterpart Vanguard Leaders. “From the Reef?”

“The Weaver,” Ikora confirmed.

“That’s… ominous,” Cayde-6 noted, crossing his arms.

“My Hidden have told me that in the Reef she’s also known as the ‘Queen’s Blade’, one of her favored enforcers and among the most skilled of her guards,” Ikora informed them. “…And she is human.”

“But the Awoken don’t host anybody other than themselves,” Cayde said. “We know that. You can visit, but you can’t stay.”

“Yes. Well. _She_ would appear to be the exception to that rule,” remarked Zavala.

“Fine. Humanity aside, what’s she here for?” Cayde asked.

“One of the Titans—” “Zachary—” the other two started at the same time, then looked at each other, Zavala motioning with his hand for Ikora to speak. She took a breath, then restarted.

“One of the Titans came to me with word and questions about the Black Garden, the Heart at its center, and its interactions with the Traveler. He was given his information by an Exo woman he had encountered in the Ishtar ruins on Venus. After I confirmed his Ghost’s suggestion that the Awoken would have the best knowledge of how to reach it, he thanked me and left.”

Zavala nodded. “Zachary requested a mission to visit the Reef and attempt contact with the Awoken in an effort to gain entrance to the Black Garden, which I approved. Later, I received a completion report saying he had been successful, and requested a follow-up mission to hunt a Vex Gate Lord and return to the Reef, which I also approved. The report after that was positive as well, noting that the Queen had assigned him protection and assistance, which we know now was the Weaver.”

“That’s…”

“Unexpected, yes. But not unappreciated,” said Ikora.

“But why now?” Cayde asked. “Why not earlier?”

“Perhaps something has changed?” Zavala offered.

“My Hidden haven’t reported any significant events or recent shifts for the Awoken.”

There was a lull in the conversation as they considered the possibilities.

“…I hate mysteries,” Cayde commented, breaking the silence and saying what they were all thinking. “So she’s here, now. And something happened, right? There’re rumors.”

“Zachary requested medical support as he approached the Tower. He arrived with a woman who was in a near-catatonic state and unresponsive, so they moved her to a medical room,” Ikora recounted. “Five hours later, she regained consciousness, but reported that there was a barrier around her with a radius of sixteen feet that only Guardians could enter and that she’d likely need to stay in the Tower until she was able to disable it. She said that a meditation room would be enough if we had them.”

“Well, _I_ heard that people saw a Ghost around her,” Cayde said. “So either she’s just randomly carrying a Ghost around or…”

“Or she is a Guardian,” Zavala concluded, Ikora nodding. He looked at his two counterparts. “We need to know more.”

“I’m going to grant her request for a meditation room as well as have accommodations in the Tower offered if she would like them. Whatever else she is, she’s still a highly-valued member of the Queen’s personal retinue,” Ikora told them.

Cayde looked between them, silent for a moment.

“I’ll talk to her.”

The others looked back at him.

“Out of the three of us, who do you think she might be more open to? The… serious, imposing Titan,” he gestured at Zavala, “the secretive, intelligent Warlock,” his other hand went up towards Ikora, “or the roguish, easy-going, _nonthreatening_ Hunter?” he finished, indicating towards himself.

Ikora slowly nodded. “That… could work.”

“So we’re good then? Everything’s decided, nothing more for tonight…?” Cayde asked.

Zavala sighed “…Yes. You may leave, Cayde.”

“Great. See you tomorrow!” And without another word the Exo turned and strode out of the large room.

Ikora and Zavala just looked at each other, commiserating in silence over their third teammate.


	9. Tower

Kali watched Weaver as a golden structure resembling a helmet flickered around her head, sputtering for a few moments before finally stabilizing in a golden glow.

“Finally,” Weaver sighed, letting out a breath while closing her eyes and rubbing the bridge of her nose.

The Ghost floated closer. “Are you okay?”

The woman swallowed and nodded, rearranging her legs where she was sitting. “Just disorienting. And _wrong_. But I’ll deal with it.”

“Wrong?”

She looked at Kali. “Yeah, it’s like having a piece of yourself missing that shouldn’t be. …I-I can’t explain it really well. Like knowing you were supposed to be able to see, but not having your eyes, and then getting them back but having to close them so that you can’t see again. Except it’s deeper, a part of you.”

The closest thing Kali could imagine was not having the Light, and even that…

Her shell-plates contracted and shuddered at the thought.

“At least now we can do things around here, right?” Weaver said calmly, but the mild discomfort and tension in her was so obvious to Kali, and the Ghost once again wondered how she ended up with such a complex partner.

 _You searched every planet in the inner system for centuries, that’s how,_ a part of her said, and she couldn’t disagree with it. Weaver had been worth it.

“What kinds of things do you want to do?” Kali asked, drifting a bit and examining the ethereal lines of Light that her Risen had woven into a pattern that thrummed with _contain suppress insulate_ in four dimensions.

“Who’s that emissary that’s out here? The one that was exiled?” Weaver asked, her eyes following Kali’s path and a small smile appearing at her Ghost’s inspection.

Kali accessed her database. “Petra Venj.”

Weaver nodded. “We should probably meet her and ask her if she has any critical news to pass to the Queen. Also get information on this city.” She glanced over at Kali. “Unless _you_ have any…”

Kali twisted her core back and forth in her shell. “Not any that would be up-to-date. It’s been over a century and a half since I was last here.”

The woman appeared thoughtful. “I’ll send a message home right after that about the situation and ask Her Grace if there’s anything she’d like me to do while we’re here. And a preliminary report and request to the Techeun Order on their augmentations.” Her expression twisted into a grimace. “I just know they’re not going to be thrilled about that.”

She looked at Kali. “Any other thoughts? Maybe go looking for some Golden Age tech we can use for Solemn Silence. Or Combustion Therapy. I think the ignition lasers might need a truly intelligent control system. The rounds keep coming out half-formed.”

“You can never have too many guns,” Kali agreed. “Oooh, and the Gunsmith! I’ll bet ten glimmer that it’s still Banshee.”

“Banshee?”

“Banshee… uh, 44?”

Weaver’s eyes widened. “ _Forty four_? I thought Exos could only go through up to twenty wipes!”

“Yeah, well. Banshee’s been around since the Golden Age,” Kali’s shell expanded and then contracted slightly, as though shrugging. “He’s like, a fixture.”

The woman hummed, pushing herself up off the ground to standing. “What time is it?”

“Nearly one in the morning,” Kali answered.

Weaver groaned. “This took longer than I’d hoped but it’s still shorter than I expected. Ugh. You have a route to that room they gave us?”

The Ghost bobbed, pulling up the data-packet she’d gotten from the man who had led them to the meditation room. “It’s six floors down.”

The Risen woman sighed, dusting herself off. “Well, let’s go try to get _some_ sleep tonight. We’ll probably need it.”

* * *

Kali drifted back to consciousness, systems coming online and running through their self-diagnostics as she exited her sleep cycle. She blinked a couple times, optic coming into focus.

The room that the Tower had given them was less a room and more a small apartment, practically luxurious with its balcony that looked out on the mountains that surrounded the City.

The Ghost floated up from the table she’d been resting on, looking at her partner who was sitting on the couch in front of it, the glowing wireframe helmet around her head, a steaming mug in her hand.

“Tea. Found it in one of the cupboards. It’s my first time having it in six hundred years,” Weaver said with a wry smile. “You were resting a lot longer than usual, it’s almost noon.”

“You could have woken me up,” Kali countered. “It’s not like I _need_ to sleep.”

Weaver shrugged. “There isn’t anything really pressing. And you’re cute when you sleep. Like a small animal or something.”

“Oh, well I’m certainly glad I’m on the same level as a _small animal_ , to you,” Kali shot back humorously, and Weaver shook her head with a smile in response.

It seemed like she was starting to act more like herself again.

“You ready to go looking around? Find Petra?” Weaver asked.

Kali was about to reply in the affirmative when there was a knock on the suite’s door. Weaver turned to her right to look at it, placing her cup down on the glass of the table before getting up and walking towards it, Kali floating behind her.

Weaver opened the door, momentarily staring at the large figure standing in the hallway before responding. “Zachary?”

The man gave a conciliatory look. “Uh. Hey. I didn’t interrupt anything, did I?”

Weaver shook her head. “No.”

Zachary relaxed a little. “Good. I was wondering if you’d like me to show you around the Tower? It’s my fault you’re here, after all. I feel a bit responsible.” He paused for a moment as if remembering something, and then added “…If you can, with that field of yours.”

‘It’d be helpful,’ Kali sent Weaver.

‘And they probably want to keep an eye on us,’ Weaver added. ‘I know that I would if the situation were reversed.’

After a moment, Kali’s partner nodded. “It’s under control. When? Now?”

“If you don’t mind?” Zachary asked.

“Now’s fine,” Weaver said, stepping through the doorway and closing it behind her after Kali had followed her out.

The hallway (like most of the Tower) was largely utilitarian, concrete walls and bright overhead lights. It was a contrast to what she and Weaver were used to in the Reef, which was either metal walkways and halls as though modeled after ships, or soft aesthetics that made it easy to forget they were really just living on a giant rock less than six hundred kilometers across.

They were about halfway down the hall towards the lift when Zachary turned to her. “So the helmet’s new?”

Weaver glanced at him. “It’s what’s suppressing my field.”

“You made it? I’ve only seen stuff like that from the Warlocks,” he commented.

“The scholars, right?” Weaver asked as they got in the lift and it started moving up.

Zachary nodded. “They do all the weird stuff with Light and try to figure new things out.”

She looked at him oddly. “You have access to power that literally defies physics and logic and you _don’t_ try to figure out everything it can do?”

The Titan shrugged. “What I have works.”

“That’s…” Weaver just shook her head. “Whatever.”

Kali could just _feel_ how much that bothered Weaver, the woman who had spent _decades_ refining her control and use of the Light, exploring its limits (or rather, the lack thereof). Training and improvement had been the singular constant in their life ever since Kali had first resurrected Weaver, and it had only become moreso when they’d joined the Queen’s Guard. Weaver could do things with the Light that Kali had never heard of, and she had to wonder if it was because she’d spent so much time on it, or because she’d never been told that she _couldn’t_ do those things.

The lift stopped and they got off, Kali and Weaver following Zachary as he led them through a hallway with light at the end. As they emerged into the light, the Titan gestured around.

“So this is the Tower,” he said, but Weaver wasn’t looking at the courtyard or spires, the kiosks or booths, instead her eyes were glued to the floating white sphere before them that was so large it almost defied comprehension.

The Traveler.

Weaver silently walked out into the courtyard and then towards the railing at the edge of the Tower, just staring at the thing before them that was casually defying gravity.

“And that’s the Traveler,” Zachary noted, making Weaver look over at him before turning back to the white sphere.

“The Great Machine.” Her voice was quiet as she stared up. “The one that created the Ghosts. …There are so many stories about it. Legends.” Weaver looked at Zachary. “There aren’t many happy endings.”

 _The Whirlwind,_ Kali thought. _The shape-stealers. The wish dragons. The Mast._

Stories and dark legends the Eliksni had brought with them from the stars. _Warnings_ , of just what horrors were possible in the galaxy, the kind that the Traveler inadvertently pulled in its wake.

She’d always wondered about her creation. The very _name_ for the thing that created her race had come from humans. The _only_ thing that Ghosts knew when they’d first awoke was that they had a purpose, and that purpose was to seek out and join another.

There’d been no information on the Traveler. Or the Light. To them, before the names, before the knowledge, it had simply been their creator and _energy_. They were constructs, but empty.

Ghosts.

 _Bilavos_ , the Eliksni call them. “Small-lights.” _Sparks._

(Secretly, she thought that name was much nicer. More appropriate. But Ghosts they were named and Ghosts they’d be.)

Weaver shook her head, turning away from the Traveler to face the Titan next to her. “So, where to?”

And so began their tour. First it was the hangar, bare metal, full of ships and mechanics, smelling like oil and fuel (and yes she could smell, thank you very much. Air-quality sensors and atmospheric analysis was _important_ when you regularly went to other planets). The courtyard that looked out on the city, with its booths and kiosks and merchants. The calm strip behind it looking out on the Sikhote-Alin mountains. The Vanguard area that descended _into_ the Tower, though they didn’t go down there. The North area, with its higher number of civilians and the Speaker’s chamber.

There’d only really been one notable interaction: that with a blue Exo who stood behind a set of tables, numerous weapons mounted on the wall behind him and a glimmer fab at the back corner.

Kali had rushed over as soon as she’d seen him, and the Exo had looked up from the disassembled weapons on the table that he was working with towards their group.

“Hey Banshee! Remember me? Kali? …Probably not. It’s been a few centuries.”

The Exo stared at her for a moment then shook his head. “Sorry. See a lot of Ghosts around here.” His voice was just as rough as she remembered, too.

Banshee looked between her and the group. “Is there something I can help you with?” he asked, optics flicking down for a moment to the Queen’s emblem on Weaver’s chest-piece and then back up.

“Not really—” Zachary started before Weaver interrupted him.

“Actually, yes. I’m looking for Golden Age parts. Smart processor for fire control, superconducting energy conduits, zero-point power cells?” Weaver said.

“You’re gonna have a hard time finding that kind of stuff around here,” Banshee told her. “I might be able to do some looking and dig some things up, but you’d probably have better luck on your own. Searching places out in the wild. There’s a lot of that sort of stuff out there. ’s just gotta be found.”

Weaver frowned but nodded. “Alright. Thanks.”

“Anytime. Just come by if you want me to take a look at what you’re doing,” the Exo offered. “I’ve seen just about every kind of gun out there. Might still be able to help.”

‘He’s probably not even exaggerating,’ Kali commented to her partner. ‘He’s likely the best gunsmith in the solar system.’

‘He could probably teach me a thing or two, is what you’re saying,’ Weaver sent back.

‘You said it, not me,’ Kali returned cheerily.

“…Later maybe?” Weaver offered, looking at the gunsmith.

“I’ll be here,” Banshee returned dryly. “Same as always.”

Up until venturing into the North Tower, Weaver and Kali had only gotten a few curious looks from the various armored people that had been around in the hangar and the courtyard. But here, with the ones who were clearly civilians, there was obvious staring and whispering.

It was different from the Reef. In the Reef, people saw Weaver as something _good_. Someone who protected them, someone to look up to, to emulate. The kind of person that children shyly ran up to to say hello in the streets and plazas.

(Kali had laughed at how off-balance Weaver had been the first time it had happened.)

That was not how it was here. The looks were cautiously curious, some filled with suspicion. Calculating.

It reminded Kali of their early years of living among the Awoken.

It was uncomfortable.

Weaver seemed to ignore it easily. Kali knew she noticed it, categorized it and threat-assessed every single person because that was just _Weaver_ in a new place. But almost as soon as they were noticed they were dismissed, and Kali could feel just how unmoved by it her partner was.

…Which led to where they were now, Weaver and Zachary eating lunch at one of the food bars in the North Tower.

“So what’s food like in the Reef?”

Weaver looked up from her bowl of noodles. “It’s artificially grown. Meat in vats. Plants in hydroponics. Vertical farming. The colony ships were more than prepared to replicate a living environment, and that included seeds and genetic information that could be reproduced. Unfortunately, cows don’t exactly live very easily in space. So we had to come up with a different solution.”

Zachary nodded. “…You talk about it like you’re one of them. Awoken.”

“Because I _am_. Maybe not physically, but they _are_ my people,” Weaver stated strongly. “When I was lost, they gave me meaning. When I was alone, they welcomed me. When I needed time, they waited patiently. When I needed a purpose, they gave me one.”

Kali didn’t remember it being _quite_ like that, but it was close enough.

“And the Queen?”

“What about her?” Weaver asked, an edge of warning slipping into her voice.

“She’s not exactly… welcoming to outsiders, is she? But you…?”

“The Queen is, and always has been, my strongest supporter. When nobody else was willing to see me as worthy of consideration, _she_ saw something in me and gave me the chance to prove myself,” Weaver said. “She welcomed me freely and gave me the chance to become more and work towards something greater when I had nothing else, and I will _always_ be in her debt for that.”

“Heeeeyyy there guys.”

Without warning, a blue Exo had sat down on the sit to the right of Weaver, dressed in light armor and wearing a cloak like some of the other Guardians they’d seen in the Tower.

“Cayde?”

_Ah. Him._

‘One of the Vanguard leaders,’ Kali sent Weaver.

‘Yes, I know,’ Weaver returned, the thought tinged with amusement.

‘Just making sure~’

“Hey Zach! How’re you doing? Who’s your friend?” The Exo paused, looking between Weaver and Zachary. “Wait, is this like a date or something?”

The immediate, overlapping _‘No’_ from all three of them —Kali included— was almost comedic.

Cayde held up his hands. “Just asking.” He looked over at the man who’d just walked out of the kitchen area. “Can I get a number three? Extra noodles?” The man nodded, wiping his hands on a towel before going back to where he’d come from.

The blue Exo turned back to them. “So. What’s up? Who’s the new face? _Really_ nice helmet by the way.”

Zachary glanced at Weaver for a moment. “This is T—”

“Weaver,” Kali’s partner interrupted. “My name is Weaver. And this is Kali.”

“Hello!” Kali greeted.

The Exo nodded knowingly. “Alright. Well, I’m Cayde-6. And this is Sundance,” he said, looking at the grey and red Ghost that flashed into existence next to his head. “Say hi, Sunny.”

“H-hi?” the Ghost greeted hesitantly.

Weaver took a breath and released the sudden hold her hand had gained on the hand cannon that was forever at her thigh.

“A little jumpy there?” Cayde asked, and then looked down at the white and gold-traced grip that held the Queen’s emblem on it. “Nice gun. Mind if I take a look? Handguns are sort of my thing.”

Weaver hesitated for a moment, but then looked at the Exo’s own gun on _his_ leg, and moved to unclip the restraining strap, pulling it out and somehow single-handedly palming the ammo cartridge before flipping the gun around and holding it out to Cayde by the barrel.

A black body and white grip accented by patterns of purple and gold, with a dark purple metal piece above the barrel that had its own golden accents, it was blocky and hard-cut in design, and the purple almost seemed like it was drinking in the light around them.

“Nice balance” Cayde commented, looking over the detail work. “It feels a bit… weird though. Heavy for a daily driver. What do you use it for?”

Weaver looked at him flatly. “Executions.”

Both Cayde and Zachary stared at her. “I’m almost afraid to ask what you call it, now.”

“Its name is Final Mercy,” she said, holding out her hand, with the Exo placing the gun in her palm. A few seconds later and the cartridge was back in place and the weapon strapped to her thigh.

“Okay then. Well. …You know, I really don’t know how to respond from that,” Cayde said. “I am now both morbidly fascinated and afraid to know more.”

They were saved from the awkward silence that followed by the man from the back coming out, carrying a bowl and putting it in front of the Exo, who split the chopsticks at his place and started eating, the other two returning to their own meals before it got cold.

After a few minutes, Cayde looked up at Weaver and Kali. “So are you like, together?” he asked, gesturing between them with his chopsticks.

“…You’re asking if I’m a Guardian,” Weaver restated.

“Well, okay, yeah, you could say that,” he admitted. “…So are you?”

She looked at him for a moment before responding. “No. I’m not one of your Guardians.” Kali saw Zachary blink in surprise before a look of understanding appeared.

“So then, what, she just travels with you?” Cayde asked.

“I’m not one of your Guardians. But I _am_ Risen,” Weaver told him, before picking up another bunch of noodles and eating them.

Cayde stared. “Okay. Wow. Talk about a blast from the past. I haven’t heard _that_ in like, _centuries_.” He looked at Zachary. “You found a real live one, didn’t you?” He turned back to Weaver. “So what are you doing out in the Reef? First thing most Gua– _‘Risen’_ do is come to the Tower. Why didn’t you?”

“Because I _couldn’t_ ,” she replied. “I was stranded in the Reef, but still did what I could. When I went before the Queen, she found me… _different_ enough to take me in. To give me a home.”

Weaver gave Cayde a pointed look. “Your Last City does not have a monopoly on suffering or need of help,” she said forcefully. “And I believe that I do more good at my Queen’s side than I would in a place that already has enough who can help them.” She went back to her soup.

Kali wanted to laugh. Weaver was channeling the Queen _so much_ right now. She didn’t even think her partner was aware of it, but to Kali, who was with her _all the time_ , it was glaringly obvious. The way Weaver’s speech became more refined, the way she talked about the Reef.

She really loved her partner.

Cayde nodded. “Alright, fair. But, it’s not like the Reef is exactly… _open_. To either help or helping. And it’s everybody’s solar system that’s at stake.”

“We work in our own ways and have more than enough to do ourselves without getting involved in your battles,” Weaver told him.

The Exo raised an eyebrow-plate, and then looked between her and Zachary wordlessly.

Weaver sighed. “Yes, I know. Don’t expect me to understand my Queen’s decisions. They are hers and hers alone. I’m simply her Blade.”

Liiiies.

Kali knew her partner knew _exactly_ what this mission meant. It was a test, a sign, and a hint of the possibility of maybe _more_ like this. And it meant that the Queen’s slow plots of breaking their isolation were being set into motion after _decades_ of stabilizing the Reef following the turmoil that the integration of the Houses of Wolves and Judgment caused.

“Speaking of which, I know your name, but what do you do?” Weaver asked, not giving anything away. “I know that Zachary is a ‘Titan’,” she said, and he nodded. “And from what I understand you’re a ‘Hunter’?”

“Yep,” Cayde agreed. “In fact, I’m the Vanguard Leader for the Hunters. Don’t do as much fieldwork as I’d like, but it’s a good job.”

“Huh. Imagine that,” Weaver commented.

“Yeah, imagine that.”

They both fell silent for a minute, Weaver going back to her food, before Cayde interjected.

“…You totally already knew that, didn’t you?” She just raised an eyebrow in imitation of what he’d done earlier as she finished off the last of her soup. “You _did_. Oh, you are… Yeah, okay, touché.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Weaver countered, but Kali felt her amusement.

“Nah, you don’t have to. I _know_. It’s like dealing with Ikora all over again,” he looked her over. “…You’re not a Warlock, are you?” He turned to Zachary. “Is she?”

“Um. She’s something… different?” he answered hesitantly, looking at Weaver while he did so.

“Oh _really_? Now you’ve got me curious,” Cayde told them. “You wouldn’t happen to be willing to, say, go a few rounds in the Crucible, would you? Bit of a friendly competition?”

“Against you?” Weaver asked.

“Well, I mean, I don’t really have much time to—” he started, stopping at Weaver’s stare. “You know what? You know _what_? Sure. You. Me. Ten other random Guardians that Shaxx pulls from who-knows-where. Yeah.”

Weaver glanced at Kali.

‘What do you think? I’m not sure this is what exactly what our Queen inten ded for me to do. But then again it _might_ be, showing the strength of the Reef? Unless we lose, in which case we look weak. Even just turning down his offer might affect our practically non-existent but still important reputation. What I do reflects on the Queen, and he almost certainly has a _lot_ more experience with that “centuries” comment.’

‘I don’t know. But I’m with you whatever choice you make.’

‘Ugh. This is why I hate politics,’ her partner complained. ‘But, thanks.’

“Tomorrow?” Weaver offered the Exo.

“Tomorrow it is,” Cayde agreed. “Say… three o’clock?”

“Three o’clock,” Weaver echoed, her grin sharp. “It’s a date.”


	10. Petra

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I just realized I never posted this to AO3 or FFN, so here you go. Next chapter'll be another past chapter with more of Weaver's Adventures in the Reef.

Petra isn’t quite what Kali expected.

Then again, she isn’t entirely sure _what_ she expected, so there is that.

What she got was them finding an Awoken woman at a bar, drinking, her outfit looking like she couldn’t decide between wearing the clothes that Kali and Weaver had seen during Zachary’s (rather extensive, actually) tour of the City, or those more like what was seen in the Reef.

“Are you Petra Venj?” Weaver asked, seating herself on the stool two seats down.

“Why? Who wants to kn—” Her words stopped suddenly as she turned and saw Weaver’s armor, illuminated by the soft glow of her ephemeral helmet. The hand holding Petra’s glass whitened. “Is this supposed to be some kind of Guardian joke? Have another laugh at the exiled Awoken? You don’t _deserve_ to wear that emblem, City-girl.” She turned to face forward. “And you got the colors wrong, besides.”

Weaver’s spine straightened.

 _Here we go…_ Kali thought to herself.

“I’m from the Reef. Not the City,” Weaver countered calmly, though Kali could feel the irritation she was suppressing.

Petra snorted. “Oh? Really? Try again, because I’m a century too old for that to work. There _are_ no humans living in the Reef. The Queen doesn’t—”

“The Queen does what she wills,” Weaver interrupted.

The Awoken woman’s expression darkened. “This isn’t amusing anymore. You’ve had your fun. Now leave.”

“No.”

“ _No_?” Petra echoed.

“I’m one of the Queen’s Guard, se—” Weaver was cut off by almost hysterical laughter.

“You. One of the _Queen’s Guard_?” Petra repeated, breathlessly.

 _‘Kali. Left arm please,’_ Weaver sent, and Kali could feel the restrained frustration and waning patience behind the request.

The Ghost obligingly dematerialized the left arm of her partner’s armor, revealing a black and white tattoo that seemed to almost glow underneath the skin. The tattoo started mid-bicep and climbed until it disappeared under Weaver’s chest-piece.

Pieces of it moved, twisting and changing at random, while other sections—a crown inside an eight-pointed starburst, a collection of three knives, a shield and spear, and the scarab that Weaver had taken as her icon upon gaining her title, its wings spread wide around her shoulder, in front of a large sword—shifted in other, subtler ways.

Petra’s laugh had slowed to a stop until she was staring at the symbols with wide eyes.

“I am Weaver of the Royal Awoken Guard. You _will_ give me the respect such a position merits,” Weaver stated harshly. “And I _will not_ accept any more insinuations that I serve our Queen with anything less than the respect and loyalty she deserves.”

A blue hand seemed to reach out without conscious thought, the tattoo moving faster, as if agitated, the closer it got.

“…We used to dream about receiving one of these,” Petra said softly. “But after Amethyst… I chose the Corsairs. Still, a _human_ …”

Weaver huffed and rolled her eyes, the Awoken woman looking up at her face. “Isn’t this a conflict of interest for a Guardian?”

“I’m not a member of the Vanguard. Her Grace found me first,” Weaver said. “This is my first visit to Earth since my original death.”

“Oh. Well, it’s not _my_ preference but perhaps you…?” Petra led.

Weaver shook her head. “The sky’s too empty. There’s not enough metal around me and the Great Machine just _looms_ overhead.”

The Awoken woman laughed. “Yes! Exactly!”

After a minute, Petra schooled herself. “Do you bring news?” And then she straightened. “Am… Am I being recalled?” The hope in her voice was almost palpable.

Kali replaced Weaver’s sleeve, her partner adjusting it momentarily. “No major news. I’ve only been assigned by the Queen to assist in a mission of interest, and that’s what led me to the City.”

“Ah…” The disappointment was carefully hidden, but still noticeable. “I understand. Anything else then? Any other happenings? I receive so little out here.”

Weaver’s fingers tapped against the counter-top. “The Houses of Judgment and Wolves have been fully integrated and now serve as part of the forces. There have been a few… minor incidents, but they were ended swiftly.”

And of course Weaver neglected to mention that _she_ had played no small part in stopping them so quickly. Kali wanted to sigh.

“Awoken population levels have been slowly rising since the Wars and we’ve been expanding the infrastructure to match,” the Risen woman said. “There was a brief attack on Vesta by a splinter faction of the Cabal a couple decades ago, but that was dealt with without issue. None of the other legions have shown any signs of changing their patterns.”

Petra nodded and sipped at her drink.

“Can I get you anything?”

Weaver blinked and looked over at the bartender who’d walked over at some point in the conversation. She turned to Petra. “Anything good?”

The Awoken woman shook her head. “No Reef wine, no Vestian sugar-spirits, no Pallasian raki, no firewater, not even any bloody simple _rebaijiu_.”

Weaver just stared for a moment before turning to the bartender. “I’m guessing it’s too much to ask for you to have any ether at _all_ for mixed drinks.”

The bartender just slowly shook his head, eyes wide.

“ _Sherbavos_ ,” Weaver sighed. “ _Fine_. Just… just bring me a gin and tonic then. Hard to get that wrong.”

The man nodded and quickly left.

“Probably not even worth it without the ether-water,” Weaver muttered.

“Where’d you get a taste for that, anyways?” Petra asked.

Weaver just looked at her. “Drinking with the Eliksni in my squad for twenty years.”

Petra nodded. “That _would_ do it.”

“You used to work with the Techeun Order, right?” Weaver questioned.

“Mmm,” Petra hummed after another sip. “Yes. I grew up among them. Why?”

“How willing would they be to share their augmentations with someone outside the order?”

Petra gave a slight frown. “Just the augments? I… cannot see them being _too_ unwilling, especially if it were a matter of health or importance. Why?”

Weaver reached up and pointed at the golden strands around her head as the bartender returned with a glass and placed it in front of her. “I have an… innate ability that I don’t have much control over that I only regained recently.”

“And you think the Techeun’s augmentations could help you?” Petra asked incredulously.

Weaver took a sip of her drink and sighed in mild disappointment before looking back at Petra. “It’s not from the Sky or the Deep. I have an entire extra region in my brain, what… thirty-five, forty percent, Kali?” The Ghost bobbed in affirmation. “A whole additional cortex, essentially, that normal humans don’t have, mostly centered in my parietal lobe, but it stretches through my entire brain.”

Petra nodded from where she was drinking, motioning to go on.

“It’s what lets me have control over my ability, or… it used to.” Weaver winced. “Somebody… changed it, but what I gained in strength I lost in control, among other things. So I need something that’ll help with my control. Right now it’s either on… or blocked,” Weaver said, motioning at the tracery helmet. “And it’s a physical issue, so no amount of meditation’s going to help me.”

“What’s so bad that you have to lock it up like that?” Petra asked. “One of the first things we were taught with the Techeun was to not suppress our abilities.”

Weaver eyed her, and then took a long drink. “I control people.”

Petra blinked. “What?”

“ _I control people_ ,” Weaver repeated. “Fifteen point nine-eight feet. If someone’s within that distance, they are _mine_. They can’t move, can’t react, can’t _breathe_ unless I will it. Unless I do it for them.”

“Oh. I see. Yes. Well.” Petra cleared her throat. “I can see how that might be a problem.”

Weaver simply gave her a look, and Kali couldn’t blame her.

“I think that in a case such as yours, they would be willing to assist you. Especially as one of the Guard,” Petra told her.

Kali’s partner nodded. “Good.”

They fell into silence for a few minutes, each drinking slowly.

“What do you do here?”

Petra looked over at Weaver. “I… well, my official position is as our Queen’s emissary. But… there’s not exactly much need for one when there’s no communication between the Reef and this City, is there?” The blue skinned woman sighed. “In the beginning I tried to collect information for the Queen, but the people here, I tried to connect with them, to understand them and the way they live but…”

“They aren’t the Awoken,” Weaver finished.

“No, no they are not,” Petra agreed, taking a drink. “And so here I am, official ‘emissary’, unable to act in any other capacity, and with nothing to do each year but wait for something to change.”

Talk about _punishment._

The Queen never did do things half-way.

“I am lucky the Queen mercifully provides me with enough funds to make do each year. I shudder to think about what the position I’d be in.”

Weaver hummed in sympathy. She looked at her glass, took a large drink, and then sighed. “I’ll be here at least through the end of the week,” she said, an open-ended statement if Kali ever heard one.

Petra just nodded in acknowledgment.

After a few silent minutes, Petra looked at Weaver.

“So tell me about the ships they’ve got you flying these days…”


	11. Reef

Kali’s power systems flickered a moment before stabilizing. Deep diagnostics ran for a few seconds before her iris finally blinked on, her core twisting wildly around to see what was happening.

“Kali!”

The Ghost looked up and saw the face of her Risen. “Weaver?”

Her current cradle of Weaver’s hand jostled as the young woman’s feet hurried through… wherever they were, Kali’s lens currently blocked from being able to see anything other than her partner.

“Oh thank God, you’re okay. I thought, I was starting to think–” Weaver’s voice grew thick, but then she shook her head.

“I’m _fine_ , Weaver,” Kali said, lifting out of her partner’s hand, her shell-pieces flying apart and then counter-rotating before snapping back to her core. “See? Nothing wrong.”

She turned around and looked at their surroundings. “But… where are we?”

There wasn’t much to see, just regolith below their feet, and darkness above with shapes inside, hazy and indistinct, almost like it was foggy.

“About two miles away from the ship. I had enough of the Light to bring myself back as soon as it settled. There was a hull breach only a few halls over, and I left from there.”

Kali was once again rather glad Weaver had learned to self-resurrect so quickly. It certainly made some things easier.

Like surviving (potentially) certain death.

“Where are we going?”

Weaver glanced over at her. “No idea. It didn’t look like there was anything in any direction, at least not before the horizon, so I just picked a direction.”

“Vesta’s horizon is only about a kilometer away.”

Kali’s partner nodded. “Yeah, I figured it was about that since I couldn’t see the ship after fifteen minutes.”

“Has there been anything else?” Kali asked.

“Not much. A few small ships passed overhead ten minutes ago, but they were moving too fast to try and signal.”

“Ah.” Kali paused, trying to think of how best to word what she was going to say next. “That’s… probably a good thing. The Awoken aren’t exactly, _welcoming_. To anyone. Risen especially.”

“Why not?” Weaver asked.

Kali sighed. “History. History and politics. Essentially.”

Weaver glanced at her. “Go on.”

"Well, um. During the Collapse, the Awoken were stuck out here. No-one knows how they survived, when so many others died. But they did, and they carved out an existence here, far beyond anything else. They’ve always been reclusive and closed off, and they never reached out to help Earth and the Last City, even when it was on the verge of being destroyed. The only time I know of that they’ve worked with the City and the Guardians was during the Ahamkara hunts.

“The last I’d heard from the other Ghosts is that the Reef tracked a Fallen group to Earth and nine Guardians from the City were caught in the airstrike. _Nothing_ in that valley survived,” Kali said softly. “Since then, relations have been… cold.”

She looked at Weaver. “As in, total radio silence, nothing in or out.”

Weaver stared forward. “So they’re unlikely to help us get a ship then.”

“Unfortunately,” Kali agreed.

Her partner sighed. “We’ll have to be careful, then. See if there’s some way we _can_ get one and leave without drawing too much attention.”

Kali bobbed in acceptance.

“That’ll probably mean you’ll have to hide yourself so I can be seen as a normal person,” Weaver told her. “If they really react so badly to Risen.”

Ugh. Kali really did not like being stuck in subspace unless there was fighting happening. The time on the Cabal ship had been more than enough for her today, but it was looking like she’d have to endure it some more.

Weaver peered at the horizon as they moved forward. “I think I see some lights.”

Within a few minutes it became apparent it was more than a _few_ lights.

“…Serenna,” Kali whispered.

Her partner looked at her. “What?”

“Serenna. It’s one of the largest cities on Vesta from what I got off that map. It’s probably what the Cabal were targeting,” the Ghost explained.

Weaver nodded. “And where there’s lots of people, there’s likely to be _some_ who would be willing to help.”

Ehhh… “Probably?”

She didn’t want to put down the woman’s hopes, but the Reef _really_ did not like outsiders.

“Can you change my clothes so that I don’t look so… foreign?” Weaver asked, and Kali blinked.

“Maaaaybe? I’d need to see what sort of things they wear, but at least for now I can make you look less obviously like a Guardian.”

Kali looked at the available smart-matter they had and started programming some into unassuming clothes, looser fabrics that would hide lines and armor, making Weaver appear more civilian.

“Also, whatever you do _don’t use your Light,_ ” Kali said. “It’s probably the fastest way to give away what you are. What _we_ are.”

Weaver nodded as Kali materialized the clothes she’d fabricated, replacing the generic helmet with a lower-face mask that covered Weaver’s nose and cheekbones, and a hooded cloak to cast the rest of her face in darkness and obscure her face.

“Actually, can you channel a bit of Light to your eyes?”

Weaver’s brow furrowed, but bit her lip and appeared to concentrate for a moment. After a second, her eyes started glowing with soft inner light.

“A little less…” The glowing wavered, and then slowly started dimmed until it was just her irises. “That! There! Can you hold that?” Kali asked.

“I think so?” Weaver responded hesitantly. “It takes more concentration than energy.”

“Perfect.” Kali drifted back, looking at her partner. Dressed in the loose subdued grays and whites, with a hooded cloak, hidden lower face, and glowing eyes that peered out from the darkness under the hood, Kali thought Weaver passed as a reasonably mysterious Awoken woman.

“Now, let’s see what this city’s like.”

* * *

It reminded Kali a bit of the Last City, actually. They were on the outskirts and there were few (or more accurately, no) people on the streets, presumably because this was the equivalent of “night-time”.

Kali had to make do with seeing things from out of Weaver’s eyes, further limiting what she could gather information on. Which right now was the streets and densely-packed living structures that looked like they were made of a mixture of regolith-concrete, metal ship plating, and reinforcement.

Weaver’s vision drifted around, moving from shadowy corner to alley to building faces, constantly analyzing and checking. A few blocks and the apartments started showing windows of business and other places on their lower levels.

On the right was a flickering sign made of those glowing yellow light-tubes bent into shapes, proclaiming the business below it a bar. Inside the dimly lit building shapes could be made out moving around, the first sign of multiple people in one place they’d found so far.

Without even waiting Weaver crossed the street and pulled the door to enter, a collection of metal fragments stringed together _tink_ -ing against each other.

Both Weaver and Kali froze.

At least half of the handful of people in the place—including the bartender—had two more arms than what a human should have, and an extra pair of eyes as well. Armor plates dotted a few of their bodies, a number having the white plastic-looking pieces on the backs of their hands, shoulders, and knees, secured in place on top of fabric wrappings. A few wore cloaks.

They were undeniably alien.

_Fallen!_

Weaver tensed as a number of the patrons—alien and Awoken both—of the bar turned to look at who’d entered, glowing eyes landing on her for a few seconds before turning back to back to whatever had held their attention before. Weaver relaxed slightly and walked towards the bar, taking a seat on one of the rough stools that looked like they’d been formed out of plate metal.

_What were the Fallen doing here?_

_‘You didn’t say there would be aliens,’_ Weaver spoke to Kali silently.

 _‘I didn’t know!’_ the Ghost returned. _‘I’ve never even seen any Fallen that weren’t hostile!’_

The bartender moved over to them, standing at least a foot taller than Weaver, looking down at her, glowing eyes standing out stark from the dark ceiling. “What can Erkis do for you?”

The Fallen’s voice was rough, a growl that rolled in odd ways over words and reminded Kali of a rock grinder.

Kali could tell her partner’s mind was racing, and after a moment Weaver replied. “Surprise me.”

For a moment the Fallen stared at her. “Very well.”

While the Fallen moved away to the other end of the bar, Weaver took the opportunity to glance around the room. The place could have been lit by candles for how dim it was. Awoken and Fallen were mixed together, a few even sharing suspiciously quiet, whispered conversations, and Kali was starting to get the sense that this was a… less than reputable establishment.

The bartender returned, a glass in his hand that looked like it steamed, except the steam immediately fell down the sides of the glass. He put it down on the counter and moved it in front of Weaver, but when her hand reached out to take it, fingers wrapping around the base, the Fallen’s lower hand on the same side was suddenly around Weaver’s and Kali felt her partner instinctively tap into her Light.

“Erkis does not know why you are here, Earthborn, but you bring no trouble and we will have no problems, yes?” the Fallen growled lowly, face suddenly inches away, the glowing eye-holes in his white breathing mask staring at Weaver.

The Risen woman nodded slowly. “Good. Forty-five Glimmer,” Erkis told her, and Kali dutifully materialized the amount in Weaver’s pocket. The woman took it out and placed it on the bar, the blue crystalline matter quickly disappearing thanks to Erkis.

 _‘What can you tell me about these “Fallen”?’_ Weaver asked.

 _‘They’re nomads. Pirates and scavengers. They came to our system just after the Collapse, and started raiding outposts and settlements. The Guardians have been fighting with them ever since,’_ Kali said. _‘They’re arranged into Houses, like fleets and flotilla, each one separate and independent. They’ve attacked the City twice. The first was just the House of Devils, but the second was a combined attack of three Houses. Both times they were pushed back and repelled.’_

_‘But why are they here?’_

_‘I don’t know. Fallen usually stick to their ships and crews, I’ve never heard of any living in a permanent location like this, much less any that don’t attack other species on sight.’_

_‘And yet they seem rather comfortable, here,’_ Weaver noted, glancing around at the number of inter-species interactions around them. _‘Or at least not hostile.’_

 _‘Yeah. I don’t… I’m sorry, Weaver. I’m really out of my depth here,’_ Kali said apologetically.

 _‘It’s okay. It just means we need more information,’_ Weaver responded. _‘Do they live here? Are they citizens? Those sorts of things.’_

 _‘I don’t know how we’d go about finding that out without arousing suspicions,’_ Kali returned.

 _‘Hmm. Could you somehow hack their systems or something and find out? I bet there’s some sort of city or plane— er, asteroid-wide network,’_ Weaver said.

_‘I… maybe. Yeah. That might actually work.’_

Kali could feel Weaver grin behind her mask. _‘Good. What would you need to do that?’_

 _‘Some sort of public access terminal. Maybe we could find a kiosk somewhere?’_ Kali offered.

_‘Mmm. I don’t know where we’d find something like that.’_

Kali gave the mental equivalent of a shrug. _‘We could just… wander around, I guess?’_

_‘True.’_

“What is it that you seek?”

Weaver blinked, and turned to look at the Fallen that had spoken to her two seats to her left. “What?”

“What is it that you seek?” the Fallen repeated, gesturing around with their lower limbs. “None come here without a reason, without a desire to be fulfilled.” The Fallen grinned behind a transparent breathing mask, their speech notably more comprehensible than the bartender’s had been. “Perhaps it is something that I may… _assist_ with? For a price, of course.”

Weaver’s hand tightened on her glass, before she forcibly relaxed it. “Information. Knowledge.”

The Fallen’s eyes gleamed. “You are lucky, wanderer. If it is information, your need look no further. But what are you willing to trade for such a thing?” they asked, tilting their head.

“Glimmer,” Weaver said first, and the Fallen clicked in mild acceptance. “…and information.”

The alien gave a hissing laugh. “I doubt that you will have anything I do not, but I accept. Come. Let us get away from these watchers.”

They stood, rising to their full seven feet of height, the motions easy and fluid. Weaver warily followed, carrying her two-thirds full glass with her as the Fallen led her further into the bar and around a corner, towards a table pressed against the wall.

Once they’d sat down, the Fallen laced their top hands together, placing them on the table. “First, we trade names. I am Marix, former huntress of that you called the ‘House of Wolves’. Once I hunted to feed the servitors. Now, I hunt secrets and stories, hidden in shadows.”

 _‘She’s… female?’_ Weaver asked.

 _‘Apparently,’_ Kali answered.

Kali’s partner tapped her glass for a few seconds before responding. “Weaver. I have no story.”

Marix’s eyes sharpened. “But you do. Lost. Stranded. Marooned. And so, so far from home. Also too trusting.”

Weaver froze in shock. “How…”

The Fallen’s needle-like teeth reappeared. “You do not sound like those of the Reef. You have an Earth-accent.”

 _‘Shit,’_ Weaver thought, and Kali had to echo the sentiment.

They hadn’t even considered that. That must have been how Erkis knew as well.

Then suddenly, the predatory tension emanating from Marix was gone as she leaned back in her chair, waving a three-fingered hand. “Do not worry. It is no matter. All are equal, even if their secrets are not. And this is but a small secret in my collection.”

Weaver nodded hesitantly. “Tell me about this place. The people. What are Fallen doing here?”

The grin Marix gave was practically terrifying. “I will give you this. And I will even give it for free, so that you live to see another day and do not die before any favors are repaid by offending one who would not hesitate to kill you.” The female Fallen’s lower right hand came up to slowly tap on the table. “Shall I tell you of the two-souls? Of the wars that were fought here and the lives that were lost, Eliksni and Awoken together? Should I tell you of the Wolves and how they now bend their knees to a Kell that is not even _‘Fallen’_ , how they have been brought into the fold of her people? Should I talk of what it is like to be scorned by all the bright-eyes, to be considered so untrustworthy as to be beneath their sight?”

“…Yes.”

Marix laughed. “A strong answer. Very well.”

Weaver took a drink, waiting for the one opposite her to start.

"I will start with the Scatter. Once, there was the _Mraskilaasan_ , that which you only-ever-two-arms called the House of Wolves. The Kells of the House of Kings called out, offering words of sweetness and the promise of triumph over the ones who sit beneath the Machine. Winter answered. Devils answered. And our Kell, foolish, ambitious Virixas, blinded by their false promises, decided to answer as well.

“We came, Earth-born. We followed him, followed to Ceres, _beautiful_ Ceres, restocking, regrouping to join the fight for the Machine. Then the two-soul Queen came and we rose to protect that little which we called _ours_. Such a small fleet we faced. We thought there was no way to lose.” Marix gave a sharp, hissing laugh. “We learned it was only so small because they needed no more. She called her pet death-bringers. I remember the feeling of it. At the end: Virixas, dead. Ketches torn to scrap. Wolves, half dead and scattered. Ceres… destroyed.”

Marix scraped her fingers across the tabletop. “We warred. Wolves and Reef. Reef and Wolves. Baroness Irxis was the first to fall, first-favored for Kell, cut down by one of Skolas’ Barons, Peekis. Both fleets, lost. Peekis, docked to two arms. Baron Parixas was next, tricked to travel to Iris, caught between Awoken and the Silent Fang that had lured him there. Skolas alone remained. Skolas the Rabid. Skolas the Mad.” Marix shook her head. "Less than one third of the Wolves were left. But Skolas would not stop. War, he said. Fight more, he said. Places of healing, places of learning, all burned to the ground. Civilian cities, destroyed. And then Cybele.

“He called it the ‘uprising’,” she said, her sibilant voice sharp like a knife. "It was no uprising. It would have been nothing but massacre. Variks of Judgment told the Crows and the Queen. Once more, she came. Skolas was captured. All his murderer-leaders, captured. Servitors, captured. With no leaders, no Barons, no Servitors, there was no Wolves. ‘Come,’ said the Queen. ‘Come, or starve and die weak and small, hunted to the last.’ Less than five thousand were all that remained of the once-great Wolves. Some ran, ran to Winter or Devils or _away_. Most bowed to the Queen. With a new Kell came new ways. Better ways, some say. There is no fighting now. No need to move at first sign of trouble. No more docking. No more two-arms. First new hatchlings born in safety in centuries, without fear of Ether-deprivation.

“Some joined the Queen’s Guard, the ones that have ambition. Most?” The Fallen shrugged, an oddly human gesture from the armored alien. "Most found new things. Now there is no fighting, no duty. There is freedom, to search and find and _live_. We are not Awoken, but the Queen is our Kell.

“Still, the bright-eyes remember the wars. They remember we fought and killed them. The Awoken have a long memory. They resent us, and there is… prejudice. Many still do not trust us even after swearing to the Queen. And that, lost Weaver, is how it is now.”

Weaver blinked, and Kali nearly blanked out at the influx of information.

She’d known the Fallen were fairly complex, that they had a strong social structure and developed language and tactics and technology. But _this_?

The Fallen had only ever been labeled _enemy_ in her mind. They’d been hostile ever since they’d entered the solar system, and she’d thought that was just the way they _were_. The idea of morals and an honor system, of distaste at attacking schools and hospitals, of them being anything _more_ than the antagonistic force she’d known them as, had simply never occurred to her.

And now… now she had to wonder why that was. Was it because it was easier to depersonalize them? To see them as nothing like humanity?

She didn’t know.

 _‘Ask her why the other Houses are so aggressive. Why they seem to hate humanity,’_ Kali told Weaver. Now that she’d been given this bit, this _hint_ of world-shaking realization, that there _could_ be peace, she wanted more, she wanted to know _why_. Why were things the way they were?

“Why are the others so eager to fight us, then?” Weaver questioned.

Marix paused for a moment, as though thinking. “…I will give this to you, since it is so rare one of you wishes to learn. But it will be the last thing you receive for free. All other questions you will pay for,” Marix told her, and Weaver nodded in acceptance.

The Fallen stared at Weaver, unblinking, her head tilted slightly. “You are not the first that the machine you name the ‘Traveler’ has visited and lifted up.”

_What?_

“Why did you think we followed it?” Marix asked. “It did the same for the us. It came and gave us everything. But when its enemies came for it, it did not stay, like it did for you. It left, abandoning us to the things that had followed it. You call your fall the ‘Collapse’. Ours was the Whirlwind, for we could only cower and watch as all we had was torn apart and destroyed. It took everything away.”

The Fallen leaned back in her chair. “If it had left your system, taking with it all hopes and chances for your species to survive, would you not have followed it? Would you not fight for it, fight for the chance for your people to have a future and not die off?” Weaver swallowed. “I was born after the Whirlwind, as we traveled, following the ripples, so I do not know what it was like Before. But those that were alive then? That remember? The oldest of us are often the largest and lead us. They are obsessed, and see the Great Machine as the only chance for the Eliksni to ever be what it once was again.”

For a moment, Weaver and Kali simply sat there, processing all they’d gained. It made an almost scary amount of sense and Kali had a growing feeling that everything around them was far more complex than anything she’d ever imagined. She felt so far out of her depth, but she could at least find comfort in the fact she had found her partner and would never have to go through this alone again.

“I have two questions, now,” Weaver said, and Marix sat up, fore-hands back on the table. “First: Where can I access an information terminal anonymously. Second: Where would I start looking to get a ship?”

“Without any traces?” the Fallen asked, and Kali’s partner nodded. “Those are small questions. One hundred glimmer for the first. Five hundred for the second. I take a risk by giving you any names such as that.”

“One hundred and I’ll tell you what caused that earthquake,” Weaver countered.

Marix’s eyes brightened. “Oh? I will be the judge of its worth, and deduct it, yes? I am fair.”

Weaver paused for a moment, before opening her mouth to start. “It was a Cabal warship that crashed down a few kilometers away, manned by a rogue faction that wanted to attack the Reef. Only a hundred or so soldiers. The commander was a Valus Trau’ug.”

Marix grinned. “A Cabal warship? There are many good parts on such a thing. Many good opportunities. That is _very_ good information. And only two hours old. For that, I will give you _both_ questions.” From somewhere on her person she took out a data shard. “Location and access keys for secure data network terminal.” A second shard came out. “Location and proof you came from me for ship contact.”

Weaver picked up the shards and tucked them away in a pocket under her cloak where Kali promptly dematerialized them and started checking the data.

 _‘Looks good,’_ she told her partner after a few seconds.

“Thank you,” Weaver told Marix.

“Any more?” the Fallen asked.

“I don’t think so,” Weaver replied.

_‘Kali?’_

_‘Nothing I can think of, unless you want a place to sleep, but that might be risky,’_ she said.

_‘Yeah. I can handle roughing it, especially if I never have to see red dirt around me again.’_

“Then I wish you a good night,” Marix said, standing. “Do not die, Earth-born. I would not like to lose such an… _interesting_ new customer.”

Weaver just nodded, watching as the alien turned around and easily slipped into the shadows, vanishing as if she’d never been there.

She looked down at the last remnants of her drink in her glass.

It was time to move on.

They had a lot to think about, anyways.

* * *

She wouldn’t have noticed it were she not keeping to the darker streets, the ones that lay in the parts of the city that were less cared for and in disrepair.

She wouldn’t have noticed it, and if she hadn’t, it was likely their future would have been very different.

But she did.

It wasn’t anything uncommon, especially for what almost seemed like a ghetto—likely for the Fallen, now that Kali thought about it. But it was enough to spur Weaver into action.

A mugging.

They heard the whimpers first, and the hissed ‘give me everything you’ve got’. As they reached the darkened alley the sounds had come from, they could see the picture clearer: a blue-skinned man with bright purple eyes, staring down at a paler woman who had been knocked to the ground, a knife held out threatening towards her. “Don’t make me say it again.”

Weaver’s jaw tightened and her hand clenched into a fist.

_‘Weaver…’_

Risking revealing themselves for something like this…

_‘I know, Kali. But I can’t. I just… This is what you brought me back for, right? To protect people?’_

Kali sighed, but her partner had a point. _‘I understand.’_

Without waiting, Weaver strode into the alley silently. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The knife shot up to point at her. “This isn’t anything to do with you. _Leave_.”

Weaver’s mouth twisted down in a frown. “I don’t think so.”

She strode forward, the man’s eyes hardening as he brandished the weapon threateningly. “I said _leave._ ”

“And _I_ said _no_.”

The woman on the ground kicked out at the man, but he noticed and stomped on her midsection, a sharp _crack_ echoing through the alley and the woman crying out as she rolled to the side.

The man’s expression turned to anger as he looked back at Weaver, who had closed the gap between them. “Fine then.”

He lunged, and Weaver’s left arm came up in an instant, inhumanly quickly, knocking his to the side as the crackle of Arc energy surrounded her right hand.

Without a word, the fist was buried in his midsection, electricity surging through his body. The man’s eyes bulged before rolling up in their sockets as he collapsed bonelessly. His knife dropped out of his hand to clang on the cement to Weaver’s side, the Risen immediately stepping on it and shattering the blade beneath her heel.

She turned to the woman on the ground, crouching next to her. “Are you alright?”

The woman nodded, though the tears in her eyes told a different story. “Thank you. _Thank you_.” She laboriously pushed herself up into a sitting position, and Kali could tell Weaver was floundering as she tried to figure out what to do.

 _‘You can heal her, you know,’_ Kali said quietly.

_‘What? **How?** ’_

_‘How do you heal yourself with Solar energy?’_ she replied.

 _‘I can do that with other people?’_ Weaver asked incredulously.

_‘Yeah. Here, I’ll help show you how. Instead of **burning** , focus on **life**.’_

Weaver closed her eyes, concentrating. _‘Okay, now what?’_

_’Gather Solar Light in your hands and put them against where she’s injured._

Kali could feel the energy collect in her partner, channeled to where she’d told her.

Weaver’s eyes opened, and she put her hands on the woman’s lower torso.

“Hey, what are… you… doing?” the woman said, trailing off as the Light circulated through her, from Weaver to the injury and back, knitting together flesh and bone, repairing burst blood vessels.

When she felt there was nothing left to do, Kali told Weaver. The Risen pulled her hands back, and the woman prodded at her side with wide eyes. “You… how?”

Weaver shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I was just in the right place at the right time. You should forget about me.”

She stood from her crouch, looking over at the downed man. Satisfied that he wouldn’t be going anywhere for a good while, she turned to leave the alley.

“Hey! What’s your name?” the Awoken called out, hurriedly pushing herself up from the dirty ground.

Weaver shook her head, not wasting another moment in exiting the alley and moving quickly down the street, keeping to the shadows that would hide her.

 _‘You did something good,’_ Kali told her partner.

_‘I know. But… that’s only one person. How many people does that happen to every night? How many are hurt **worse**? How many more could I help? Isn’t this what I’m supposed to be doing?’_

Kali had no answer, but she knew that night, something important had changed.


	12. Crucible

There’s a number of things I like about being twice-living, about being a Lightbearer.

Being able to find myself, to find _who I am_ without the baggage that Taylor’s memories brought along gave me a perspective I don’t think I ever could have accepted otherwise.

First, I love challenges.

I finally had to admit and accept this five years after my resurrection when my Queen managed to twist me into taking over the Eliksni contingent of her Guard with nothing more than a few pointedly-aimed words.

Secondly, I hate losing. I _hate_ it. It was a bitter pill to swallow, finding that I had such a glaring and easily-manipulable flaw, but as far as being Risen goes, it’s actually not that bad.

Because being Risen? Means you don’t _have_ to give up. (…Usually.)

There’s no absolute death as long as you’re not totally stupid, and the ones that you do experience are often painful enough to teach you the lesson of not ever trying what caused them again. And the firepower a single Risen can bring to bear is no laughing matter.

In the twenty years of practice I had, I’d managed to get my Solar fire strong enough I could melt a city block if I truly wanted. I’d only gotten it to happen intentionally once, and it took a hell of a lot out of me, but it was possible.

So with those two things in mind, being in this Crucible, facing someone who had decades if not _centuries_ of experience on me? It was maddening.

Two teams, six people each.

It took the first two rounds just to get a hang of how the engagements flowed and how my teammates worked.

Why so long? Because I quickly learned that fighting other Risen is _nothing_ like fighting anything else.

The Hive are at least semi-careful about fights, but rush in and attempt to overwhelm if they feel backed into a corner, the thrall and acolytes fighting with fervor that could only be done by zealots. The Cabal are a military force, built on honor and working like a machine so well-crafted it doesn’t even _need_ oil.

A splinter like what I’d dealt with, I learned, was very, very, _very_ rare.

Eliksni in general were scavengers, skirmishers, fighting when they felt threatened or were after some objective. _My_ Eliksni were strike teams, terrifyingly accurate and well-trained, the fifteen years I’d put them through pushing them to match the rest of the Guard’s ridiculously high lethality.

But, they still fought with self-preservation as their core, something I’d beaten in to their heads to avoid any idiots from getting notions of self-sacrifice.

One’s life is _sacred_ , because without it there was no way to further keep your companions from dying, to serve and be _useful_ (something I’d found was oddly offensive to the Wolves of the Guard, not being useful).

Guardians?

Guardians are idiots.

And they fought _nothing_ like the commandos I was so used to.

They’re not so much idiots in the way they act or react, but the way they treat their (im)mortality.

They were so much more aggressive in obtaining objectives or pushing to gain ground it wasn’t even funny.

Cayde was by _far_ the worst. Because he had the skills to back it up.

I may have had different equipment, custom weapons with exotic effects that seemed better than theirs on average, but that in _no way_ prepared me with having to fight a bunch of extremely mobile tactical _nightmares_ that were more than willing to get grievously (or even mortally) injured to get what they wanted because they could heal in seconds.

And as depressing as it is to say it, it probably showed.

I was not trained for this. Whether as the Queen’s Weaver or in my previous life, I was not prepared for this sort of situation. It was like fighting a team of capes that were all Brutes and could heal in seconds, with a versatility that easily rivaled the strongest parahumans I’d encountered. Hell, most of them outshone that blue lady I’d collected, and she’d been _ruling_ her world.

The closest I could compare was fighting the Slaughterhouse Nine Thousand, except there _were_ no direct counters like we had in that fight.

I quickly realized I was not winning this. There was simply no way.

I hadn’t _needed_ to accept the challenge, but I had.

And now I was paying for that.

Not that I was going to let them beat my impromptu team and I easily.

The Queen’s Blade did not go down without a fight.

“Kali, prep the Shrapnel Launcher.”

This was going to get _messy_.

* * *

“It was a good game.”

Five to three. _Five to three._

Kali could feel Weaver’s frustration.

Ugh. Well, they’d known this wouldn’t be easy. They just hadn’t predicted _how much so_.

Weaver stared at Cayde’s extended hand warily for a moment, eyes moving up to the Exo’s face and then back down, before she sighed and reached out to shake it. “Yeah.”

“Hey! No need to be so down!” Without any warning, the man had swiveled around and clapped her shoulder, arm across her back. “You did pretty damn good for a rookie. Not many people could have pulled that off. Also, can I just say, that I will _never_ be able to look at a bow the same way again?”

Kali felt Weaver’s lips twitch at the corners.

The bow, simultaneously one of the simplest and most sophisticated weapons they had, was something they were particularly proud of. A weapon that could channel _Light itself_. Guardians could temporarily create constructs of Light when they’d generated enough to use in a fight, but Weaver could channel hers directly through the bow in any element, making it last significantly longer. _Aurelian Fiat_ may have been a bow in a gunfight, but that didn’t make it any less lethal, especially with the Light.

“I’d say the same thing about those knives you threw if I wasn’t so interested in trying them myself,” Weaver said, looking at her hand as a flare of Solar energy rushed down her arm and then filled out into the shape of blades held between her fingers.

Cayde pulled back to look at Weaver. “Okay, now you’re just showing off.”

The brunette made no attempt to hide her smirk, the blades of Light fading as she released her hold on the construct.

“But seriously, good job. I haven’t been pushed like that since Ikora,” Cayde said. He suddenly turned to her. “Say, do you play cards?”

Kali started cackling.

As least they’d get to make up for the loss in the Crucible by robbing the Vanguard blind.

The Queen would probably enjoy hearing that.


	13. Audience

“Hah. Hah. Hah.”

_‘Weaver…’_

“What is it?” the young woman asked from where she lay on the top of the building, staring up at the ever-purple mist hanging in the sky and the stars twinkling behind it.

A burst of light bloomed into existence in front of her, Kali materializing from the subspace pocket she’d been in. “Why are we still doing this?”

Weaver stared at her Ghost, eyes scrunched in confusion even as she still panted from exertion.

“When did getting back to Earth and the Vanguard become unimportant?” she asked. “We’ve been here for _three months_. We aren’t even trying to get back anymore, and _don’t_ tell me it’s ‘just temporary’ because we know it isn’t,” the Ghost said shortly, cutting Weaver off as the woman opened her mouth to refute Kali’s statement.

Weaver sighed, her eyes moving away from the floating intelligence back to the stars and the sky. “I don’t know.”

Maybe it was when they’d found out getting a ship for outbound transit headed for Earth—if not one for themselves personally— would take at least a month, and more glimmer than they had. Maybe it was that first night when Taylor had saved and healed the Awoken woman. Maybe it was when they’d seen the prejudice and treatment of the Eliksni first-hand.

“Wasn’t it what you wanted? Getting back?”

“Yes!” the brunette answered immediately, but then hesitated. “No. Maybe. I don’t know, okay?” She gave a deep breath. “…Does it even matter?” she asked quietly.

“Doesn’t having to skulk around like this bother you? Moving around so much? Sleeping in alleys and renting rooms from people who won’t ask questions? Getting meals in places like Erkis’ bar? Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t have to hide and could be recognized for what you’re doing? Could live off it?”

“How many people have we saved, Kali? How many muggings? How many assaults?” Weaver asked, sounding tired.

They both knew it was a rhetorical question.

“I don’t care about recognition. Or money. Or comfort,” she said, and looked back at her Ghost. “If I hadn’t helped those people, what would have happened? _Nobody else_ tried to help them. Even when there were other people _right there_. …Fucking bystander effect,” she muttered heatedly.

It seemed like another piece of Weaver’s first life was showing itself.

Kali groaned to herself, floating down to rest on Weaver’s hands, which were crossed over her chestplate.

“This… vigilantism isn’t sustainable, Weaver. We can’t do this forever. We’ve gotten lucky so far, but sooner or later someone is going to start asking _questions_ ,” she said softly. “I’m with you no matter what you choose, but…”

But some choices just didn’t work in the long run.

“I know,” Weaver whispered, extracting the hand on the bottom to bring up and rest on Kali’s shell.

“…I know.”

* * *

It turned out it was sooner, rather than later, that their luck ran out.

“Halt!”

Weaver froze mid-step in the darkness of the alley, turning around slowly.

An Awoken woman stood in the mouth of the alley, dressed in a skintight black outfit with purple sash and a black helmet and visor that almost completely covered her face. A blue pistol was held in front of her with both hands, pointed right at Weaver’s center of mass. “Raise your hands above your head.”

_‘Kali?’_

_‘She’s one of the Queen’s Guard.’_

_‘Actual law enforcement then. Shit.’_

_‘What do you want to do?’_

_‘Well, I’m not going to resist, if that’s what you’re asking.’_

Weaver was already doing as the woman had ordered. The Guard moved forward two steps, gun still trained on her. “Lace your fingers together and put your hands on your head.”

Kali’s partner complied, putting her hands on top of her hood. The officer’s left hand came off her gun and lifted to push something on the side of her helmet.

“It’s her.” She paused. “Acknowledged.”

She turned her attention to Weaver. “If I ask you to come with me, will you resist?”

“No,” the young woman responded.

“…Will you please remove your hood?” the Guard said.

Weaver hesitated for a moment, the Guard’s right hand tightening on the grip of her pistol before Kali’s partner reached forward and drew her hood away.

The Guard took a half-step back. “ _Human_ …?”

The fact Weaver’s eyes were still glowing probably threw her off even more.

For a minute neither of them moved, the darkness and quiet of the alley seeming to become oppressive.

“Can you please lower the gun?” Weaver asked, breaking the silence.

The Guard jolted, as though she hadn’t even been aware she was still pointing it at Weaver, before hurriedly holstering the pistol. “Ah. Maybe you should keep the hood up for now.”

Weaver just nodded, replacing her hood.

“Follow me,” the Guard said stiffly, turning around and beginning to walk towards the entrance of the alley.

Weaver trailed after her obediently. “Where are we going?”

At the mouth the Guard paused, glancing at Weaver before looking forward again.

“The Queen.”

* * *

They did not go directly to the Queen.

First there was a airship to take them to the palace’s city half-way across Vesta, the first small transport Weaver and Kali had been in together since Weaver’s resurrection.

Then there was processing, waiting, getting screened, and more waiting.

Apparently, the Queen was a busy woman and didn’t have much free room in her schedule.

They were forced to wait for three hours in a bare room barely five meters square, though it was significantly higher quality construction than what they were used to in the Eliksni ghettos and poorer areas of Serenna.

And then—only then, when it was just becoming Vesta’s equivalent of ‘evening’—were they finally escorted under armed guard to the throne room.

* * *

The room was large, a hall more than a chamber. Purple banners with the same crown emblem the Guards had hung from the walls, with pillars carved from glazed white rock that had black and light purple veins running through it and the floor made from the same. Starbursts of indigo-blue were embedded in the stone, pockets of amethyst that had somehow been (un)naturally formed inside the rock.

The moment Weaver laid eyes on the Awoken woman seated on the large chair— _throne_ —at the top of the tiered stone platform, she knew the Queen was not to be trifled with.

Just looking at her made her spine straighten.

Once they were within ten feet of the platform the Guards that had escorted Weaver stopped, turning and moving away to stand at the edge of the room at the walls.

The Queen and Weaver stared at each other, analyzing, measuring.

Her hair was white, not platinum, or light blond, but the color of snow, of ash. Her eyes were like flecks of glowing glacial blue ice, as cold and hard as what they resembled.

“Human.”

In comparison, the pale violet undertone of her skin was unremarkable with how accustomed Weaver had become after three months of being among the Awoken.

Weaver stayed silent, the Queen’s eyes locked with her own, darting between the Risen woman’s own glowing irises.

At this point Kali was pretty sure she was just keeping it up to unnerve everyone else. People did not expect humans to have glowing eyes.

“And a _Lightbearer_. Tell me why we shouldn’t have you struck down now for invading our realm, much less your crimes against our citizens.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Weaver said stubbornly. “And if helping others is a crime it’d certainly explain why no one else did.”

The Queen’s expression didn’t change, but it felt like the air between them froze. “We can protect our own. We do not need _assistance_ from one such as you.”

“I didn’t do it for _you_ ,” Weaver retorted. “I did it for _them_.”

The Queen remained impassive. “You presume much. This is not your City. _You do not belong here, **Lightspawn**._ ”

“I don’t ‘belong’ anywhere. Much less some City I’ve never even been to on a planet I can’t even remember,” Kali’s partner returned hotly. “They already have enough people, from what I’ve been told. Why _shouldn’t_ I be where I can actually make a difference and not just be another body?”

“We do not need you,” the Queen restated, but her voice was less harsh than before.

Kali floated out of where she’d been resting in Weaver’s cloak, unable to stay quiet any longer. “There’s a crashed Cabal ship that was intended for Serenna that says otherwise. _How_ many did we save by bringing it down where we did? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Did you ever wonder why so many of the crew were dead before you got there? You may _not_ need us, but we still helped save you.”

The Queen fell silent, staring at them. She took a slow breath, then stood, descending the steps until she stood less than two feet from Weaver and Kali. Her eyes never broke from Weaver’s. “You…”

Her mouth pursed. “You are something quite different, aren’t you?”

 _‘I think I should take that as a compliment,’_ Weaver sent to Kali. _‘But I’m not entirely sure.’_

The Queen extended a hand, and Weaver had to fight to stay exactly where she was. Two fingers came up to touch her forehead, and then trailed across to her temple. The Queen’s ice-blue eyes flared slightly, their glow strengthening. “So much, for nothing. So close, but not enough.”

The glow subsided, and her hand dropped away. The Queen took a step back, still looking up at Weaver.

For a moment, neither moved. And then the Queen spoke. “We have decided.”

Kali shifted nervously, her shell twitching.

“We give you a choice. Take a ship, go to your Last City. Become what you were intended, one among many.”

“Or…?” Kali prompted when it didn’t seem like she’d continue.

The Queen’s eyes never wavered from their laser-like focus on Weaver’s. "Join our Guard. Prove yourself to be what you say. Live up to your ideals.

“Become something _more_.”


End file.
